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T H E C A P T I VAT E C O L L E C T I O N
Perspectives on the business and craft of audience engagement • medium.com/captivate-us
T H E C A P T I VA T E C O L L E C T I O N
8 Introduction: The Captivate Collection RANDY BENNETT, DIRECTOR, ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND PARTNERSHIPS UF COLLEGE OF JOURNALISM AND COMMUNICATIONS
E N G A G E M E N T
10 What’s the Key to Media Success? Products that Build Relationships DAVID COHN, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, AJ+
13 What Buzzfeed, Medium and Adafruit Know About Engagement RYAN SINGEL, CO-FOUNDER, CONTEXLY
17 Be Social, Leverage Technology, Build Stuff TOM KELLEHER, CHAIR/DEPARTMENT OF ADVERTISING, UF COLLEGE OF JOURNALISM AND COMMUNICATIONS
21 Monetize Passion, Not Pageviews: A Q&A with Jim Brady JIM BRADY, CEO, STOMPING GROUND
24 What Customers Want is Invisible to the Eye KAILA COLBIN, CO-FOUNDER, MINISTRY OF AWESOME
T H E C A P T I V A T E C O L L E C T I O N
S T O R Y T E L L I N G
29 From Story Told to Story Lived DARREN “DAZ” MCCOLL, GLOBAL CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER, SAPIENTNITRO
32 An Actor’s Guide to Better Storytelling ROB BIESENBACH, CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS CONSULTANT AND WRITER
36 Creating a Richer Storytelling Experience MARK POTTS, FOUNDER, NEWSPEG.COM
T H E C A P T I V A T E C O L L E C T I O N
M A R K E T I N G
41 The Dawn of a New Era in Marketing RISHAD TOBACCOWALA, CHIEF STRATEGIST AND MEMBER OF THE DIRECTOIRE+, PUBLICIS GROUP
44 “Emotional fulfillment, not technology, will be the stand-out offering of a winning brand” KEVIN ROBERTS, CEO WORLDWIDE, SAATCHI & SAATCHI
48 Don’t Call It Advertising Anymore DOUG WEAVER, FOUNDER AND CEO, UPSTREAM GROUP
51 We Need a New “Church and State” in Digital Publishing JASON KINT, CEO, DIGITAL CONTENT NEXT
T H E C A P T I V A T E C O L L E C T I O N
M E T R I C S
55 Chasing Clicks: Metrics Should Support a Strategy, Not be a Strategy
MATT BOGGIE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR/RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, THE NEW YORK TIMES
59 The Disconnect Between Analytics and Engagement: How Publishers Can Bridge the Gap
SACHIN KAMDAR, CEO, PARSE.LY
63 Video Production is on the Rise – But Who’s Watching?
JOSH SCHWARTZ, CHIEF DATA SCIENTIST, CHARTBEAT
67 Stakeholders are in Charge, so Organizations Count on Data Analytics and Insights
JUAN-CARLOS MOLLEDA, CHAIR/PUBLIC RELATIONS DEPARTMENT, UF COLLEGE OF JOURNALISM AND COMMUNICATIONS
T H E C A P T I V A T E C O L L E C T I O N
M I L L E N N I A L S A N D E N G A G E M E N T
71 Agile Content Marketing will Replace Social Media Marketing
JEFF FROMM, PRESIDENT, FUTURECAST
75 Communication and Engagement are Smaller Parts of a Larger Equation
DAVID ARABOV, CEO AND CO-FOUNDER, ELITE DAILY
T H E C A P T I V A T E C O L L E C T I O N
When you can do the common things of life
in an uncommon way, you will command
the attention of the world. — George Washington Carver
T H E C A P T I VA T E C O L L E C T I O N
The ability to capture people’s time and
attention and move them to action
has become increasingly challenging
in today’s media environment. Prolif-
erating platforms, ubiquitous connec-
tivity, an explosion of media choices
and other factors have fragmented
audiences and shifted media behavior.
Consider these data points:
• The average adult’s attention span is 8 seconds,
down 4 seconds from 2000. The average attention
span of a goldfish: 9 seconds. (Statistic Brain)
• Adults spend about 14.5 hours a day across 7 me-
dia platforms (Statista)
• Millennials spend an average of 17.8 hours a day
with different types of media and trust user-gen-
erated content 40 percent more than information
from other media (Crowdtap)
• In 2012, media consumption in the U.S. averaged
63 gigabytes per person per day, or roughly 7
DVDs worth of data. (USC)
• The average American adult uses four different
devices or technologies to get news. Nearly 7 in 10
of adults under 30 say they learned about news
from social media in the past week. (API/AP)
• The average adult, by one conservative estimate,
sees between 300 – 500 marketing messages a
day (Telesian)
• Meanwhile, 74 percent of U.S. DVR users record
shows so they can skip advertisements (Motorola)
Media companies are scrambling to find new strate-
gies to engage elusive audiences, particularly young
adults.
The Captivate Collection, compiled by the Universi-
ty of Florida College of Journalism and Communi-
cations, provides perspectives from leading news,
advertising, public relations and entertainment ex-
ecutives on captivating audiences in an increasingly
cluttered media universe. The aggregation of these
thought leaders is unique and offers insights to any
media executive challenged with engaging and in-
fluencing audiences.
The articles in this collection originally appeared in
the Captivate collection online. The online collection
contains additional thought pieces and is updated
periodically with new perspectives. Please visit and
recommend us there. And feel free to share this pub-
lication with your colleagues.
— Randy Bennett Director, Entrepreneurship and Partnerships
University of Florida
College of Journalism and Communications
[email protected], @randybennett
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 8
E N G A G E M E N T
Any essay about the future of news,
even when it’s the relatively near
future, should start with a caveat:
The future is unpredictable. And an
essay on the future of engagement
should also point out that buzzwords
are often fungible. Pinning down the
meaning of engagement, let alone its
future, is a snipe hunt.
D A V I D C O H N Executive Producer • AJ+ @digidave
W H AT ’ S T H E K EY TO M E D I A S U CC E S S ?
P R O D U C TS T H AT B U I L D R E L AT I O N S H I P S
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 10
T hat said, I have sensed a changing
tide in the last few years and I ex-
pect it to continue. The two most
important elements of this change:
Media and technology companies
are becoming conflated. Perhaps
eventually indistinguishable.
Secondly, questions around news products and
consumer experience have taken the forefront over
questions of “who” or “what” is jour-
nalism. I will focus on that here.
From 2001 to roughly 2011 the debate
in journalism communities was
about who is a “journalist” and what is
“journalism.” Today these questions
are a bit of a joke, best epitomized
by the “but are bloggers journalists”
satire response in Twitter.
But now, pointing to Snowfall as a “marquee” mo-
ment, product is being discussed in journalism
communities over these old academic conundrums.
And key to this are questions of how the product
builds a relationship, dare I say “engagement,” be-
tween content and readers.
From a blog post: I would argue the “citizen jour-
nalism” debate was mistakenly put in this context
(if it is not from a journalism organization, it must
not BE journalism to a consumer) but I think history
has shown this debate to be false. And it’s not that
the new frontier of “product” will make us question
whether something “IS” or “IS NOT” journalism,
instead it will fundamentally free us up to think
through the experience of consuming news and
it is here (defining the experience of journalism in
digital context) that fortunes will be made. This is
where you get Vox, Circa, Rookie.com, Scroll Kit (now
acquired by Automatic) and more.
In days long since passed there were two products:
the subscription, for loose relationships, and adver-
tising for transactional strong relationships. Today
there are many products. Where once
subscriptions meant repeat reader-
ship, today loyalty to a news brand
has taken a back seat to Google’s
search product or various social net-
working products. All news brands
look the same in your Facebook feed,
so there is no loyalty except to the
social network itself.
An ongoing relationship with a small
audience is more valuable than a mass of fly-by read-
ers that will never return. And in place of subscrip-
tions, products that create loyalty are invaluable.
Online subscriptions are still an option to create
that ongoing relationship — but even the successful
New York Times metered-wall, backed by the most
trusted brand in news, can only claim 3 percent of
its 31 million unique monthly views as digital-only
subscribers (another roughly 5 percent may be print
subscribers viewing content online). The question
then is: What about the other 92 percent? Why ar-
en’t they ‘engaged’ — can we offer them something
besides ‘subscribing’ to be engaged with? How can
we ensure these aren’t fly-by eyeballs?
ALL NEWS BRANDS LOOK THE
SAME IN YOUR FACEBOOK FEED, SO THERE IS NO
LOYALTY EXCEPT TO THE SOCIAL
NETWORK ITSELF.
CAPTIVATE
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 11
That phrasing “eyeballs” is precisely part of the
problem. If we think of readers as eyeballs how can
we successfully sell advertising? Advertisers don’t
want eyeballs — they want to touch the brains, the
minds and the souls behind those eyes. Before we
can offer up the whole human
condition to advertisers — we must
engage it wholeheartedly. Look
critically at your advertising prod-
uct for consumers. Do you wonder
“where’s the beef?”
As I’ve written before: “Engage-
ment, even if we have trouble
defining how to measure it, has
value either because it bolsters
a bottom-line metric (that can be
monetized) or because ‘engage-
ment’ helps advance the relationship between the
publication and readers.” Before any organization
thinks about how to improve engagement, they
need to define it for themselves. You can’t solve a
problem until you’ve clearly identified it.
At Circa we created the “follow” feature. This is
core to our product and it allows us to keep track of
what a reader has consumed so we can better serve
them in the future. As a story unfolds, we treat a
returning reader differently than a brand new read-
er. One gets the introductory ex-
perience to a story, the other gets
information based on the context
of what we know about them. Even
while staying passive, this product
is a new kind of engaging relation-
ship with readers. It respects their
context, previous knowledge and
eliminates time wasting repetition
of information. It is our version of a
‘subscription.’
It’s unknown what new products will
surface in the next 3–5 years, but I am confident they
will abound and I believe that news organizations
that become increasingly structured like technology
companies and focus on experiences that ensure on-
going relationships over mass “eyeballs” will win.
DAVID COHN is Executive Producer with AJ+. At the time of this writing, he was chief content officer of Circa, a startup
redefining how news is consumed on the mobile phone and one of the first organizations to experiment with atomized news
structures. During his career he had the opportunity to work on some of the first experiments in distributed reporting, social
journalism and “citizen journalism.” In 2008 he created the first platform to crowdfund journalism. In 2010 he was named one
of the “Ten Under 30” by Folio magazine and in 2013 Columbia’s Journalism School gave him the Alumni Innovation Award.
…NEWS ORGANIZA-TIONS THAT BECOME
INCREASINGLY STRUCTURED LIKE
TECHNOLOGY COMPA-NIES AND FOCUS ON EXPERIENCES THAT ENSURE ONGOING
RELATIONSHIPS OVER MASS “EYEBALLS”
WILL WIN.
CAPTIVATE
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 12
Engagement is the new hot buzzword in
publishing. There’s lots of talk from industry
watchers and thinkers about concentrating on
attention minutes or building a loyal audience.
Unfortunately, there’s very little engagement
building actually happening in publishing.
Many publishers are still chasing page views
and cheap clicks. They continue to obsess over
monthly uniques, even if they are crap visitors
who show up from Facebook once due to a
viral post and never visit the site again.
R Y A N S I N G E L Co-founder, Contextly • @rsingel
W H AT B U Z Z F E E D, M E D I U M A N D
A DA F R U I T K N O W A B O U T E N G AG E M E N T
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 13
P ublishers fret over Facebook’s algo-
rithm changes and are watching,
with trepidation, as Twitter slowly
starts to slide towards a feed that
looks more and more like Face-
book’s.
Legacy general interest publications and news-
papers with cost structures from the print era are
being hit the hardest. They face the threat of extinc-
tion. You need only to read the financial news about
Newsweek and Time and USA
Today to see this.
Their troubles are myriad. They
have no voice. They have no com-
munity or don’t know what it is.
Their audience is general, in a
world where general isn’t needed.
But not all publishers are doomed.
The very visible publishers that
are winning in the engagement
environment are doing two things
correctly.
One, each knows who their community is, and they
feed those communities’ needs.
And two, these publishers have invested heavily in
tech, innovation and data analysis: Vox, The Verge,
Buzzfeed, The New York Times, Medium, The Wash-
ington Post, Bleacher Report, Upworthy and Vice. (One
thing you’ll notice about all of those winners: not one
of them uses Outbrain, Taboola, and the other bottom
feeder arbitragers like Ad.Content and nRelate, etc.)
These are the winners in the general interest cate-
gory, which is increasingly going to be hard to win
in as news becomes a commodity, sites with voices
and a stance build a community, and aggregation
sites siphon the juice from larger organizations that
do real reporting without knowing their audience.
The other winners are less obvious, unless you are
looking closely.
One of our favorite publishers is Adafruit. (Full dis-
closure: They are a Contextly client.)
Adafruit is a young manufacturing company based
in New York City that sells DIY
electronics components to a new
generation of makers. They have
50+ employees, making and sell-
ing programmable electronics to
customers who make LED jewelry
or kitchen drawers that open with
a secret knock.
Adafruit publishes about 100 blog
posts a week. Every employee con-
tributes to their blog. The founder
Limor Fried hosts a weekly hang-
out called Ask an Engineer to talk
about what their community is building and to help
their customers build cool stuff. The company’s CEO
Phillip Torrone describes Adafruit as a “publication that
happens to sell electronics.”
They are constantly innovating, not just with prod-
ucts, but with their publishing.
They now have a different theme day — Fridays, for
example, are Raspberry Pi day, and the content for
the day centers on that theme and what people, in-
cluding their readers, have built. They’ve got a vi-
brant Google+ community, and encourage readers to
LEGACY MEDIA COMPA-NIES THAT DON’T KNOW
HOW TO INNOVATE, THAT HARBOR INSTITUTIONAL RESENTMENT AGAINST
THE LOSS OF THEIR MONOPOLY AND DON’T
UNDERSTAND THEIR COMMUNITIES, THESE WILL PASS AWAY OR
FADE INTO OBSCURITY.
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© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 14
share what they are building — which has led some
volunteer sharers to eventually get hired.
But, it’s not just niche publishers who are thinking
about their community.
Buzzfeed — whether you love it, hate it or love-hate
it — has done an extraordinary job thinking deeply
about their audience and figuring out how to feed
their audiences’ need while simultaneously further-
ing Buzzfeed’s growth. Buzzfeed’s listicles, quizzes,
and gif stories are all built around trying to figure
out new ways to entertain and inform their audi-
ence. They think digital first — and aren’t stuck on a
model of replicating what worked in print.
Take for example, the annual running of the interns
story. This tells a behind-the-scenes media story of
how big media organizations deal with the Supreme
Court’s archaic process of releasing opinions in pa-
per form. It’s a hilarious and informative new story
format.
And when something like that works, Buzzfeed tries
to understand it and figure out how to systematize it
by building those insights into their tech stack.
Here’s Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti explaining
that process to Felix Salmon in a monster interview
in Medium.
“When we have something that’s a hit, usually our
response is not, let’s do more of those. Our response
is, let’s figure why this is a hit and make variations of
this. This was successful because it was tied to some-
one’s identity, it was successful because it had cats in
it, or it was successful because it had humor, or it was
successful because it tapped into nostalgia. If you’re
making entertainment content, which is a big part of
what we do, you look at that hit and you say, ‘Why was
that successful? Can I do it again? Can I make some-
thing else that people really love and want to share?’
And you try to vary it, even though you know doing
something derivative would work. Long term, you
want to have a deeper understanding of how to make
great things. That’s really the focus. That comes from
people in a room talking and saying, ‘Oh, let’s try this,
let’s try that.’ And valuing people doing new things,
not just valuing people doing big things.”
Medium is another media company that’s thinking
about engagement. Focused on essay-like content
presented in a very clean reading environment, Me-
dium puts the reader experience first. Writers on the
platform see more than just pageviews — more im-
portantly, they see read minutes.
Here’s a very simple thing that Medium thinks about
that many sites don’t. When a reader gets to an end
of a story, what do they see and what do you want
them to see? Many sites show a long bio of the au-
thor. Others show a list of tags and categories. Is that
what a reader is interested in?
Likely no. Maybe they want an easy way to dive into
the comments and see a comment that editors pro-
moted. That’s what Ars Technica does.
Other sites lead with their share buttons. Others go
with content recommendations, assuming readers
want to dive deeply or find other interesting stories.
The BBC has links to other sites’ stories on the same
topic. These are all valid ways to think about what
a reader wants. But a long author bio isn’t one of
those. That’s just a way of jamming in something
the publisher thinks needs to be somewhere, with-
out thought to the reader experience.
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© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 15
Find another place to put that bio.
There’s one lesson that many online sites have yet to
fully grasp from the time when newspapers held a de
facto monopoly on distribution and the means of infor-
mation for a community.
These publications strove to act as the central hub
of information for that community:
with wedding announcements, cross-
words, event listings, movie critics,
local business news, and high school
sports scores (even if, it turns out, that
they weren’t able to do that in the digi-
tal world where communities are much
narrower).
These days readers’ attention can go
anywhere they like to get the news and
entertainment that’s useful to them.
There’s no monopoly on their attention
in the morning, like there used to be when newspa-
pers on the doorstep had no competition.
We live in a world where many sites try
to get attention anyway they can: jumping on
the trending hashtag of the hour; writing click-
bait headlines and re-writing other sites’ work,
often with the slimmest of attribution and no
fact-checking.
But that race ignores the real question facing these
sites, how do you convince people with choice to
return to your publication?
Legacy media companies that don’t
know how to innovate, that harbor
institutional resentment against the
loss of their monopoly and don’t un-
derstand their communities, these
will pass away or fade into obscurity.
The ones that will thrive will be
those who think about how to serve
their audience; that understand what
brings people to a site and what gets
them to return; and perhaps most
importantly, what gets them to be a
loyalist.
Engagement isn’t a trick, and it’s no longer
guaranteed. Instead, it must be earned with a
publication-wide dedication to and mindset of
serving readers.
ENGAGEMENT ISN’T A TRICK,
AND IT’S NO LON-GER GUARANTEED. INSTEAD, IT MUST
BE EARNED WITH A PUBLICATION-WIDE
DEDICATION TO AND MINDSET OF
SERVING READERS.
CAPTIVATE
RYAN SINGEL is co-founder of Contextly, a service that helps publishers increase readership through related content
recommendations. Ryan started writing for Wired.com in 2002, after spending three years working for search startups in the
DotCom boom. An online journalist from the start, he’s always been on the digital side of barricades in the media revo-
lution. His beats for Wired.com have included privacy, security, search, social networking, tech policy and startups. He also
co-founded the award winning Threat Level blog.
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 16
Congratulations on your engagement.
Go ahead and update your Facebook
status. Tell the world you’re in a
relationship. But with whom (or what)
are you engaged, and what exactly do
we mean by “engagement” anyway?
One way to parse through all the
definitions of engagement is to look
at how the concept is observed.
T O M K E L L E H E R Chair, Department of Advertising
UF College of Journalism and Communications • @tkell
E N G AG E M E N T : B E S O C I A L , L EV E R AG E
T EC H N O LO GY, B U I L D ST U F F
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 17
IDENTIFYING ENGAGEMENTIt would be almost impossible to identify mutually
exclusive categories of engagement, but to move
this discussion forward with a little extra clarity,
we might think of three types.
1. Engagement can be seen as the way people interact
with technology and content — a sort of human-com-
puter or human-content interaction. When you see
reports touting increases in Twitter,
Facebook or YouTube engagement,
chances are that engagement is
measured by some accounting of the
number of likes, comments, shares,
tweets, retweets, favorites, views, etc.
2. A level deeper, engagement is
the way people interact with each
other. The term conversation is up
there with engagement in today’s
buzz lingo. Are people actually re-
sponding to each other in mean-
ingful ways? This is a bit trickier to measure on a
large scale than the mere number of comments or
replies. It requires more qualitative observation and
human judgment, but it isn’t that hard to identify.
We know it when we see it.
3. Engagement is also psychological. In addition to the
behavioral indicators above (e.g., clicking on things,
responding to each other) engagement can be treated
as a cognitive or affective phenomenon. Or it can be
some integration of the two. In fact, conceptual syn-
onyms for engagement — terms like involvement,
interactivity, activation and arousal — are among the
theoretically hardest terms to nail down because they
imply a mix of thinking, emotion and behavior.
LOOKING AHEAD – ADVERTISING ENGAGEMENTThe future of advertising lies in consumer en-
gagement with brands and products. Mass media
are not going away as channels for advertising,
but online ad spending long ago outpaced print
advertising in newspapers and digital advertising
more recently surpassed national TV spending
in the U.S. Investment in interactive advertis-
ing will continue to accelerate. Large-scale mar-
keting success in the next few
years will be driven by mobile and
cross-platform messaging, and
automated but personalized inter-
actions.
Advertising planning will require
new competencies in media math.
We already are seeing dramat-
ic shifts from static rate cards to
live auctions for media buying.
CPM (cost per thousand) is giv-
ing way to CPC (cost per click)
and CPA (cost per action). For planners, this first
type of engagement is probably more import-
ant than humanistic dialogue. Buying and sell-
ing are at the heart of exchange relationships,
and digital marketplaces depend on technological
efficiencies.
Creatives will still focus on psychological engage-
ment as that coveted mix of perception, cognition
and emotion that leads to consumer behavior,
but creatives too will need to pay more attention
to emerging technology. They must empathize
with how their audiences engage brands and
products across social, local and mobile platforms
and devices.
LARGE-SCALE MARKETING SUCCESS
IN THE NEXT FEW YEARS WILL BE DRIV-EN BY MOBILE AND CROSS-PLATFORM MESSAGING, AND AUTOMATED BUT
PERSONALIZED INTERACTIONS.
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© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 18
LOOKING AHEAD — PUBLIC RELATIONS ENGAGEMENTConverged and integrated public relations and ad-
vertising blend all three types of engagement, but
public relations relies most on engagement as in-
teraction between people. Building and maintain-
ing mutually beneficial relationships between large
organizations and publics now entails the manage-
ment of countless online interpersonal interactions.
Publics are more likely to interact directly with
someone within an organization than ever before.
They are less likely than before to
get their information about organi-
zations from a reporter who got her
story from a news release that was
written by a public relations person
who interviewed an executive in-
side the company.
I have been a big proponent of the
join-the-conversation approach to
social media, and I stand by the idea
that good human conversation is necessary for suc-
cess in public relations, but the real work now is
managing public relations in a way that optimizes
the meaningfulness of all those conversations. The
overarching goal of public relations is for organiza-
tions and publics to adapt to each other in mutually
beneficial ways.
FROM JOINING CONVERSATIONS TO BUILDING PERSONALIZATIONIn early fall 2004, I was a professor at UNC-Chapel
Hill. I had been studying and teaching “new media”
for several years prior at the University of Hawaii,
but I was still a few months away from joining “the-
facebook.com,” a privilege bestowed on me with my
unc.edu domain membership. Twitter didn’t exist.
Blogs were new and hot, and I wanted to know what
they meant for strategic communication. I had the
chance to hear a visitor named Doc Searls tell me
and others in person that public relations people,
marketers and advertisers needed to lighten up and
join the conversation. I was shocked right into a new
research agenda that focused on the soon-to-be-rag-
ing topic of social media.
Ten years later I’m a new professor and chair of the
advertising department at the University of Flori-
da (again just off the jet from Ha-
waii). And now I’m trying to figure
out what engagement means for
advertising and integrated commu-
nication. This time the spark comes
from a speaker I heard at an aca-
demic conference in Montreal last
month. Michael Krempasky, a gen-
eral manager for Edelman’s digital
public affairs team, told his audience
of professors and graduate students
that one of the keys to effective digital strategy is
that you have to build stuff. He used Obama’s 2012
campaign as an example. Of the hundreds of peo-
ple working on digital in that effort, only a hand-
ful were assigned to purely “social.” The rest were
busy writing code, building apps, and figuring out
the digital nuts and bolts of the machine to mobi-
lize voters.
I looked down at my phone during Krempasky’s pre-
sentation. I figured it wouldn’t seem rude because
those around me would assume I was live-tweet-
ing the talk or posting to the group Facebook page.
You know, joining the conversation. But the app on
my phone wasn’t Twitter or Facebook. It was a con-
ference app called Guidebook that let me custom-
...THE REAL WORK NOW IS
MANAGING PUBLIC RELATIONS IN A WAY
THAT OPTIMIZES THE MEANINGFUL-
NESS OF ALL THOSE CONVERSATIONS.
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© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 19
ize my own personal schedule at the conference,
synced my calendar, pinged me when I had a ses-
sion to attend, showed me maps, and — if I was so
inclined — let me engage conference-related con-
tent on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. But I wasn’t
so inclined. I’d say 90% of that app’s utility to me
was practical and data-driven, and only about 10%
was social.
Shocked again.
It’s not that social isn’t critical for the future of en-
gagement. It is absolutely necessary. Searls was
and still is right. But he and his fellow visionaries
were first and foremost builders of stuff. They are
developers who taught communicators something
about communication in their world of technologi-
cal innovation.
People need training, apps that facilitate the
conversations need development, feedback
needs analysis, and creative strategies need
adaptation. It all requires personalization, but
that personalization must scale for big brands,
large organizations, and massive markets and
publics. Communicators must work closely with
developers.
Mass personalization — it’s a paradox and a man-
date. Solving it will take a mix of technology, data,
research, planning, creativity and social. I’m guess-
ing about 10 percent social.
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© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications
TOM KELLEHER is chair of the Department of Advertising at the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communica-
tions. Tom has been a member of the faculty at the University of Hawaii for the past eight years and served as chairman of the
School of Communications from 2010–2013. He also served on the faculty at the School of Journalism and Communication
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2004–2006. His first book, “Public Relations Online: Lasting Concepts
for Changing Media,” released by SAGE in 2006, was among the first scholarly textbooks in public relations to focus on the
implications of social media and “Web 2.0” technologies for theory and practice.
20
Brady: Engagement metrics are typically defined
by site structure and mission, whether or not
you’re trying to build page views to sell against
or build engagement. In our case, our key focus
is how many times we get people back to our site
in a month. Our goal is to get people to read our
journalism and take action in the community.
To build and become part of affinity groups and
groups of interest. So for us, engagement is the
number of times they come back, if they’re leaving
comments, if they’re attending events.
J I M B R A D Y CEO, Stomping Ground • @jimbradysp
M O N ET I Z E PAS S I O N , N OT PAG EV I E WS :
A Q & A W I T H J I M B R A DY
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 21
How do you define user engagement? What are the metrics that you use to gauge engagement performance?
T he metaphor is like having someone
in a meeting and being bored out of
their skull. They’re there, but that’s
not engagement, that’s attendance.
Engagement is action and a two-way
conversation. Having people come to
your site and learn something and
leave with something to do. I don’t need a million peo-
ple every month, I just need the right 150,000.
UF: What are the key trends that are shift-
ing consumer media behavior and forc-
ing a rethinking of how we engage users?
Brady: The continued disaggregation of
the traditional model is a key factor. It’s
hard for any brand to attract enough audi-
ences to build a business around. Today’s
audiences’ affinity is not with traditional
brands but with friends and influencers.
The battle today is not about getting the most page
views but to get a smaller amount of people to your site
and to come back often. The goal now is to be relevant
enough to get people to think about your site as a place
to go, whether through social or not. I don’t need a mil-
lion people every month, I just need the right 150,000.
UF: What are the key characteristics that separate those
media companies who are successfully engaging users
with those who are not? Who do you think is doing it best?
Brady: Ninety percent of the most interesting things
are coming from the new news sites. Buzzfeed is do-
ing a really good job with engagement. They have won
that war by understanding the platform and putting up
compelling content. They understood for a long time
that the average news consumer today is not wired
the same way our generation was. They don’t worry a
lot about juxtaposition of stories and tone the way old-
er news organizations do so it’s OK to put cat pictures
next to an Iraq story.
They also understand that a headline doesn’t have
to tell you everything about the story. For traditional
news organizations, the headline for the movie “Old
Yeller” would have been “Dog Shot.” It’s OK for the
headline to draw people in without giv-
ing away the ending. It’s the same issue
with the traditional inverted pyramid.
That structure is designed to get people
to leave sooner.
NPR is doing it right, particularly with
their NPR One app that lets listeners
choose the stories they want to listen to.
What Vox is doing with Vox Card Stacks
that provide summaries and context for big news sto-
ries is also interesting.
Gawker has done some interesting things with com-
menting. They were not afraid to blow up the com-
menting model and try new things. The key for many
sites is how to attract readers without having to put a
lot of their own resources against it. That’s why com-
ments are important and people shouldn’t shut them
down just because 10 percent of the commenters are
psychopaths.
Another great example is The Guardian in London.
They got a raw dump of 700,000 MP expense reports.
They offered up the database to their readers to comb
through and if they saw anything odd, they could re-
port it to The Guardian and they would investigate.
TODAY’S AUDIENCES’
AFFINITY IS NOT WITH TRADITIONAL BRANDS BUT WITH
FRIENDS AND INFLUENCERS.
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© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 22
They used the crowd to work the project and used
them as a mass reporting force.
UF: How will your new Billy Penn site be different
than other media ventures you’ve worked for, partic-
ularly around engagement?
Brady: The big difference is that what we are trying
to do now is monetize passions and not
pageviews. For example, we might cu-
rate a lot of stories about development
in Philly. People will get one button to
get deep information about develop-
ment. We hope from there people will
build groups around that topic and then
we would monetize those groups.
On top of that is real-world engagement.
If you’re covering a limited physical
area, if you can get people in a room or
bar, it brings engagement a level up.
Local media can only scale so far. We’re going to try
to figure out how to scale all of those groups into
meaningful numbers. We also hope to get half of our
revenue from events and memberships.
UF: What would you recommend to traditional media
companies to help them compete more effectively
with the Buzzfeed’s and Upworthy’s of the world?
Brady: Stop making fun of the new companies and
look at what they’re doing well. Laugh all you want
but in the digital news area, they are kicking a lot
of asses. I get tired of the eyerolling and pissy com-
ments. They are showing us the way.
UF: What are the key skills that future journalists (or
marketers) should be developing to be successful in
their craft?
Brady: Understand engagement and
partnerships and the power of audi-
ences beyond putting up comment
boards. Students also need to know
more about the business side. If we
crank out 10,000 new journalists but
only half understand the business,
we’re not going to move the profes-
sion forward. Entrepreneurism is im-
portant for students to understand.
I also get a little worried that we are breeding a
whole generation of journalists who are good at a
lot of things but not great at any of them. We are
trying to teach them reporting, video production,
data analysis, social media. But to stand out in this
environment, you need to build a specific expertise.
You have to have a sun in your solar system. Pick
something you can build around. All of the rest of
the skills will make you even stronger.
LOCAL MEDIA CAN ONLY SCALE
SO FAR. WE’RE GOING TO TRY TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SCALE ALL OF THOSE GROUPS
INTO MEANINGFUL NUMBERS.
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JIM BRADY is the CEO of Stomping Ground, a mobile-focused local news startup that will launch its first site, BillyPenn, in
Philadelphia this fall. Jim is the former Editor-in-Chief of Digital First Media, where he oversaw the 75 daily newspapers, 292
non-daily publications and 341 online sites that are owned by Journal Register Company and MediaNews Group. He also
oversaw the launch of Project Thunderdome, which redefined how DFM produces journalism by centralizing the production
of non-local content so that local papers can focus on their local communities.
23
In 1961, Ray Kroc bought a small restaurant
chain off of the McDonald brothers. The rest, as
they say, is history: the exponential expansion,
the investments in real estate that made the
parent company so financially successful,
the rigid systems and processes — including
forced revolution of the potato-growing
industry — that ensure every Mickey D’s
french fry from Finland to Fiji tastes identical.
K A I L A C O L B I N Co-Founder, Ministry of Awesomeness • @KColbin
W H AT C USTO M E R S WA N T
I S I N V I S I B L E TO T H E EYE
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 24
I n 1961, Ray Kroc bought a small restaurant chain
off of the McDonald brothers. The rest, as they
say, is history: the exponential expansion, the
investments in real estate that made the parent
company so financially successful, the rigid
systems and processes — including forced rev-
olution of the potato-growing industry — that
ensure every Mickey D’s french fry from Finland to
Fiji tastes identical.
Kroc wasn’t the first to come up with the idea that
consistency and scalability through systems and
technology are the foundational pillars of a global
franchise. From Henry Ford to Walt
Disney, from H&M to Home Depot,
the Western commercial landscape
has become dominated by this
type of factory-produced, churned-
out offering.
But it’s not just products that have
become standardized. The auto-
mate-and-replicate mindset has
extended, Borg-like, from what-we-
sell to how-we-behave, and is now
seeking perfection everywhere from analog cus-
tomer service scenarios (“Welcome back to the Four
Seasons, Mr. <Lname>; would you like Room <Room-
Number> like last time?”) to digital email missives
(“Dear <Fname>, We truly value you as a customer.”).
Engagement is governed by scripts, bots, and autore-
plies. Quantitative metrics over qualitative relation-
ships. Bland repetition over quirky uniqueness. And
the more pervasive technology becomes, the stron-
ger the temptation to rely on it in every possible sce-
nario.
I understand why management
loves automation, really I do. People
are expensive, unpredictable and
hard to train. We don’t scale well.
Sometimes we say stupid things.
We have emotional baggage, con-
troversial opinions, conflicting be-
lief systems. We aren’t always as
compassionate as we should be, or
as clever as we could be, or as thoughtful as we need
to be. It’s easy to see why service organizations (and,
believe me, every organization that has customers
is a service organization) would want to ensure ab-
solute consistency in customer interactions.
To be fair, we as consumers often want absolute con-
sistency as well. We want products to be consistently
high quality. We want websites to work consistently
well. We want people to be consistently honest, gen-
uine, professional and attentive.
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AS ENGAGEMENT BECOMES MORE AND MORE AUTOMATED, WE RESPOND MORE
AND MORE STRONGLY TO PEOPLE WHO FEED
OUR DESIRE FOR HUMAN CONNECTION.
25
But when we engage with one another as human
beings — whether it’s face-to-face, on the phone,
through email, or via social media — we don’t want
to encounter automata on the other end of the inter-
action. We want people who can understand our ac-
tual needs, who can relate to our actual desires, who
feel as we feel and laugh as we laugh; if a policy or
a rule makes no sense, we want to deal with people
who can change or override it. As the Frank Herbert
character Darwi Odrade says, “Give me the judgment
of balanced minds in preference to laws every time.”
Consider, for example, our surprise and delight when
we do find ourselves on the receiving end of a truly
human connection — as happened last year when a
Netflix customer service rep introduced himself to
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a problem-reporting customer as, “Captain Mike of
the good ship Netflix.” The “Captain” asked which
member of the crew he was speaking with… and,
when the customer replied as an officer of Star
Fleet, the entire ensuing conversation was held in
character. A VentureBeat post about the interac-
tion was shared almost 15,000 times on Facebook;
who knows how many times the screengrab of the
chat was shared.
Or, on the media front, consider the difference
between spam and true personalization. News-
week’s Zach Schonfeld recently did a week-long
experiment in which he replied to every email
he received (instead of directly deleting the hun-
dreds of press releases that jammed his inbox).
The irrelevant missives he received are simulta-
neously hilarious and depressing, highlighting
the need to ask two very simple questions: who
is going to receive this communication, and why
should they care?
“Over the course of the morning, I respond to a
release about a French company specializing in
the production of mechanical components with a
chirpy ‘I don’t know much about drilling and op-
tronic assembly, but thank you for sharing!’ I get
an email about a professor who is available to
comment on Hong Kong’s democracy movement
and reply saying I’ll be sure to keep him in mind
if I cover Hong Kong’s democracy movement even
though I know I probably won’t wind up covering
Hong Kong’s democracy movement… At one point I
get an email about USA Insulation — ‘the country’s
largest retrofit insulation company’ — opening a lo-
cation in Rockland County.…”
26
As engagement becomes more and more automated,
we respond more and more strongly to people who
feed our desire for human connection. We don’t want
to feel like we’re being stepped formulaically through
a pre-determined funnel. We want to be seen as indi-
viduals, appreciated for who we are, tamed the way
Antoine de St. Exupery’s Little Prince tamed the fox:
“ ‘One only understands the things that one tames,’
said the fox. ‘Men have no more time to understand
anything. They buy things all ready made at the
shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one
can buy friendship, and so men have no friends
any more. If you want a friend, tame me…’ “
In the product world, there is pushback to the au-
tomate-and-replicate world of Wal-Mart and West
Elm, and the market for handmade, local, craft
items has become insatiable. For large companies,
the challenge is now to resolve the inherent con-
tradiction: how do you satisfy customers at scale,
when the very thing they’re after is uniqueness?
The answer lies in understanding what to scale.
Etsy has achieved a $600-million-plus valua-
tion by automating the platform through which
people can engage with each other on a person-
al level, and their success holds the secret to
the future of engagement. They scaled the bits
where we want maximum efficiency, so that we
could more thoroughly enjoy the bits where we
don’t.
Do not seek to automate that which should not be
automated, and do not seek to systematize that
which must remain alive. Automate your logis-
tics, your inventory, your accounting. But when
it comes to connecting a person in your company
with someone who patronizes your company, for
any purpose whatsoever, allow humans to be hu-
mans: quirky, unexpected, responsive, and alive.
It is harder to quantify this kind of engagement.
But that doesn’t make it any less valuable, as St.
Exupery knew:
“’Goodbye,’ said the fox. ‘And now here is my se-
cret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart
that one can see rightly; what is essential is invis-
ible to the eye.’”
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KAILA COLBIN is a co-founder and trustee of the non-profit Ministry of Awesome, an organization dedicated to watering the
seeds of awesome in Christchurch, New Zealand as well as the Curator of TEDxChristchurch and the founder and director of
New Zealand social media consultancy Missing Link. She is also a PMPÒ certified Project Manager, Chairman of the Board of
the New York-based Natural Gourmet Institute for Health and Culinary Arts, a board member of CORE Education Ltd. and a
member of the Advisory Board for the Christchurch Transitional Architecture Trust.
27
S T O R Y T E L L I N G
Each of us has personally experi-
enced a variety of ways that the world
around us is rapidly changing. It’s fair-
ly easy to recognize that the catalyst
for that change is technology. The
way we get through the day today is
very different than it was five years
ago, a year ago, and how it will be just
six months from now…
DA R R E N “ DA Z ” M C C O L L Global Chief Strategy Officer, SapientNitro@daz_mc
F R O M STO RY TO L D TO STO RY L I V E D
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications and www.medium.com/captivate-us
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications29
O ne thing that hasn’t changed
for marketers is that our main
objective is to change consum-
er behaviors and shift percep-
tions. I think our ability to un-
derstand what makes people
tick is one critical aspect of a
necessary evolution in how we ac-
complish this objective. Alongside
that, lies our ability to create sens-
ing and adaptive worlds leveraging
those insights.
People connect with brands and
brands connect with people through
two main avenues — emotional con-
nections, where they share values
and also through experiential con-
nections, where there’s some sort of
behavioral interaction and participa-
tion. Bringing these dimensions of
connection together creates shared
stories; stories where the brand be-
comes part of the consumer’s world
and story. This calls for the science
of storytelling to evolve so that we
craft stories that are non-linear and
include experiences and emotional
connections.
While story will always be integral, our strategy for en-
gaging consumers in today’s always-on world involves
an evolution of the timeless craft of storytelling. We’ve
found that people are much more likely to connect
with, remember and share an experience that they par-
ticipate in themselves versus one they just hear, read
or watch. Therefore, we feel that “experience” is the un-
derleveraged and key element for effective storytelling
in the digital world. We need to tap into our ability to
create immersive and participatory experiences within
the story, to move from a story told to a story lived.
Storyscaping® is our approach which suggests
brands create worlds — not just individual elements,
like ads, sites or apps — that en-
courage, inspire, and foster interac-
tions both from an emotional and
an experiential level.
Storyscaping is a holistic effort that
is part art and part science, and it
takes a cross-pollinated diverse
team. If you’re interested in see-
ing the full step-by step approach,
check out the New York Times
Best Seller that I co-authored: Sto-
ryscaping — Stop Creating Ads,
Start Creating Worlds. It serves as
a roadmap to help brands evolve in
an organized and successful way.
The following are a few of the Sto-
ryscaping guiding principals from
the book:
Determine Brand Purpose. The foundation of success
rests on having a cause or belief that positively reso-
nates with internal and external participants. This will
likely be related to your history or foundation as a busi-
ness. It should be powerful and meaningful; every kind
of company has such a purpose, and today you need
to make sure it connects with customers. Your core
purpose is your belief about making people’s lives or
world better. How does your brand make the world a
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WE NEED TO TAP INTO OUR ABILITY
TO CREATE IMMERSIVE AND PARTICIPATORY
EXPERIENCES WITHIN THE STORY, TO MOVE FROM A STORY TOLD
TO A STORY LIVED.
better place and customers’ lives better? Once you fig-
ure that out, be incredibly authentic in how you deliver
the message about your product and how you engage
with participants.
Understand the Participants. Assess your ideal cus-
tomers and learn everything you can about them. What
do they desire? What do they need? How do they feel
about things? How do they behave? Really look into
their behavior patterns and the way they do the things
they do and why.
Become a Mentor. Customers do things that serve their
own interests. Brands need to shift away from acting as
the hero of the story (“If we build it, they will come”), and
begin to play a supporting mentor type of role (“we are
creating a cooperative and participatory environment
where we share with our customers”). While this is a
pretty simple premise, it requires a shift in perspective
and behavior for most company leaders. We believe it’s
one of the most worthwhile shifts you can make.
Create A World. When customers participate with
brands, they actually enter a world where they are en-
couraged to explore various points of interconnection.
Explore how technology can open up our realms of pos-
sibility for creating customer experiences that inspire
stories at various points within that world. Also explore
the ways technology can increase your ability to sew
endless cohesion among the points within that world. In
other words, design each point to finish with a comma,
rather than a period.
Employ Organizing Ideas. Above any “big idea” hov-
ers an “Organizing Idea”, which serves to inspire expe-
riences that change behavior and drive transactions
while it keeps the whole effort organized and focused.
Determine an Organizing Idea that encapsulates your
purpose and positioning while linked to consumer un-
derstanding. Then develop your Story System around it.
Recognize the Ripples. Traditionally marketers have
tried to figure out what would create a big splash. To-
day, we can put more emphasis on the ripples from that
splash. Thanks to social media, if you make a single
customer really happy (or really unhappy) large num-
bers of people are likely to hear about it. Capitalize on
that logic. An event, even for a relatively small number
of customers, can be a very worthwhile investment if
those customers share images and comments about
the experience with their social networks. Look for ways
to create social capital.
Storyscaping is designed to put you back in the market-
ing driver’s seat and fill your company with deeper con-
nections with your participants. The model is non-lin-
ear; you can start anywhere, as long as you have an
informed Organizing Idea and you apply it to the Expe-
riences Space. Ready to shift from creating stories told
to stories lived?
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As Chief Brand Strategy Officer for SapientNitro, DARREN MCCOLL’S primary role is to help business grow by bringing
insight through strategy and inspiration to creativity. He is a co-author of the New York Times best seller Storyscaping — Stop
Creating Ads, start creating worlds. Darren has worked with numerous local and global brands such as: Virgin Blue Airlines,
Virgin Megastore, McDonald’s, Nestlé, Foster’s, Burger King, Subway, Footlocker, Coca Cola Brands, X Games, ESPN, Ford and
Mercedes Benz, Visit Florida, BBVA, Ideal Image.
Google the term “storytelling in busi-
ness” and you’ll get 17 million results.
Storytelling is clearly a hot topic, and
we’re all told repeatedly we should
use more stories in our everyday
communications. Yet one question
goes unanswered in most of these
reports: what exactly is a story?
R O B B I E S E N B AC H Corporate Communications Consultant and Business Writer • @RobBiesenbach
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications32
A N AC TO R ’ S G U I D E TO
B ET T E R STO RY T E L L I N G
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© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 33
JUST AS IMPORTANT AS WHAT GOES
INTO A GREAT STORY IS WHAT YOU LEAVE
OUT. BECAUSE A PERFECTLY GOOD
STORY CAN BE RUINED WHEN IT’S WEIGHED
DOWN WITH A LOT OF UNNECESSARY DETAIL.
Let me give you a hint: a quote from Steve
Jobs is not a story. A customer testimo-
nial is not necessarily a story. A picture
of a dog in the rain may or may not be
a story. A true story — one that carries
the full impact a story promises — con-
tains certain fundamental elements.
SO WHAT IS A STORY?
A colleague of mine sought to an-
swer this question for a book he
was writing. His research led him
to 82 different definitions of story!
The one he settled on happened to
be the definition I was taught at
Chicago’s famed Second City, the
birthplace of comic legends from
John Belushi to Tina Fey. Its train-
ing center is also where thousands
of ordinary people like me go to
study the art of improvisational and sketch comedy.
They taught us that story is a character in pursuit
of a goal in the face of some challenge or obstacle.
How that character resolves that challenge provides
the dramatic interest that keeps us captivated.
Now you can layer on other elements, from an ironic
twist to a moral lesson, but these are the essential
building blocks for crafting a simple, effective story.
STORY AT WORK
One of my favorite stories involved a company I
worked with that manufactures candy and gum.
They wanted to demonstrate their commitment to
quality, so we went looking for stories.
I was talking to a woman down on the
production line named Estela. Her job was to in-
spect the gum before it went out the door. When
I asked her what she did to ensure quality, she
walked me through her processes from start to
finish, showed me a checklist of all the criteria
she looks for and demonstrated how the x-ray
machine works.
It was interesting, but it wasn’t a
story. It was just information.
So I asked her what her kids think
of what she does. That’s when she
lit up. She pointed to a code on the
back of one of the gum packages.
That code tells you exactly when
and where the gum was made,
right down to the individual shift
and production line.
The kicker is, her children can read the code. So
when her family goes to the store, the kids run
straight to the candy aisle, turn over the packag-
es of gum and when they find the right code, they
yell, “This is mommy’s gum! My mommy made this
gum!”
Now that’s a story. It’s got a great character at its
center: a mom. Her goal is quality, and among the
challenges she faces is complacency — how do you
maintain your focus on what many would consider
a mundane, repetitive task?
She resolves that challenge by thinking of her
customers as family. Three things make this story
especially effective.
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© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 34
CHARACTERS COUNT
Think about the great characters from TV and mov-
ies: Walter White, Tony Soprano, Indiana Jones. They’re
what keep us tuned in. It’s why we’ve been watching “I
Love Lucy” for more than half a century. It’s right there
in the title: we love her.
So your number one job as a storyteller is to find a
character that resonates with your au-
dience. And what’s more relatable than
a mom looking out for the health and
well-being of her children?
In the end, nobody really cares about
processes or programs — they care
about people.
EMOTION FUELS STORIES
Emotion is what gets us involved in a
story. When Ryan Gosling or Jennifer
Lawrence pour their hearts into a role, we feel what
they feel.
An emotional appeal breaks down our defenses, leav-
ing us more open to influence. Yet so many erstwhile
storytellers would get hung up on the technical aspects
of Estela’s story, and it would end up looking like this:
“Our employees are committed to quality. They use
state-of-the-art technology and inspect every pack of
gum according to 32 proprietary criteria — all to ensure
that the gum you buy is as fresh and good as the day
it left our door.”
But that’s not a story. First, there’s no character. And sec-
ond, it’s all data and information. It doesn’t stir the soul.
As renowned marketer Seth Godin says, “The market
is not seduced by logic. People are moved by stories
and drama and hints and clues and discovery. Logic
is a battering ram.”
FOCUS IS ESSENTIAL
Just as important as what goes into a great story is
what you leave out. Because a perfectly good story
can be ruined when it’s weighed down
with a lot of unnecessary detail.
In sketch writing classes they taught
us that every scene starts with a
strong premise and every word and
action must support that premise. It
has to drive the story forward.
So you may have a joke that’s guar-
anteed to send your audience rolling
on the floor laughing. But if it doesn’t
address the premise, it has to be cut. Funny for the
sake of funny is not good enough.
Similarly, every story we tell must have an objective.
And any extraneous fact or detail that doesn’t serve
that objective must be cut. Interesting for the sake of
interesting is not good enough.
Question every detail. Eliminate the interesting, but
not mission-critical, asides. Cut the irrelevant names,
dates and numbers. Get rid of the clutter and keep the
story moving forward.
EVERYBODY CAN TELL A STORY
While some people play fast and loose with the defi-
nition of story, others are intimidated and think sto-
rytelling is just for the experts.
WORK THE KEY STORY ELEMENTS.
FIND THE EMOTIONAL CORE. CUT THE FAT. AND KEEP REFINING AND
POLISHING YOUR STORY UNTIL YOU’VE
GOT IT RIGHT.
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© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 35
ROB BIESENBACH is fighting to put an end to dull, ordinary communications in our time. He helps his corporate clients cut
through the clutter to engage employees, customers and other audiences. He is also a Second City trained actor. He brings
these worlds together in his workshops and books — Act Like You Mean Business and 11 Deadly Presentation Sins — which
are helping people become more skilled, confident communicators so they can enjoy more success in life. You can follow
him on Twitter: @RobBiesenbach
But I’ve found that with a simple structure, anyone
can tell a decent story. We may not reach the heights
of Mark Twain or Martin Scorsese, but that’s okay. No
weekend golfer expects to play like Tiger Woods.
Start by thinking of your audience’s big challenges.
What’s stopping them from achieving their goals?
Find a character who’s overcome those obstacles.
It could be an historical figure, someone you work
with, or even a member of the audience you’re try-
ing to reach.
Work the key story elements. Find the emotional
core. Cut the fat. And keep refining and polishing
your story until you’ve got it right.
If you can learn to craft and tell a good
story, there’s almost no limit to what you
can do: lead employees, sell to customers,
rally teams, nail a job interview, earn a raise and
much more.
Just focus on the fundamentals.
A great story once began: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. For the art of journalistic storytelling these days, it’s both. It’s the best of times because we have a wealth of storytelling tools at our dispos-al today unlike anything we’ve seen before: video, audio, interactive features, mapping, data visualization, simulations, compu-tational gadgets, the ability to link to the world’s knowledge. The ways that we can tell a story these days are virtually limitless.
M A R K P OT T S Founder, Newspeg.com • @pottsmark
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C R E AT I N G A R I C H E R
STO RY T E L L I N G E X P E R I E N C E
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© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 37
AS WE CONTINUE TO EXPLORE THE NEW
TECHNOLOGICAL TOOLS AVAILABLE TO US, IT IS LIKELY THAT NEW FORMS OF STORYTELLING
WILL EMERGE AND TAKE HOLD.
But it’s the worst of times because
most news stories still are being
told the old-fashioned way: in text,
often via an inverted pyramid, with
a lede, a couple of quotes, a nut
graf, and on and on for hundreds
or thousands of words — pretty
much the same way stories have been told since,
well, Charles Dickens wrote “Tale of Two Cities” — and
long before that.
Those written storytelling conven-
tions arose, logically, out of our oral
traditions — as written language de-
veloped, it made sense to commit sto-
ries to paper using only words. But it’s
illogical today, with so many alterna-
tives available, to keep telling the vast
majority of stories the same way we
always have. Some stories lend them-
selves to so much more than words, and we now
have the ability to better match the form to the story.
Sure, there have been notable exceptions to the dom-
inance of the written word. Everybody seems to point
to the New York Times’ famous 2012 effort, “Snow
Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,” which brought
together graphics, maps, links and interactive fea-
tures — albeit with a backbone of standard text. Not
everyone is as taken with “Snow Fall,” but in a frozen
wasteland of old-fashioned storytelling, it stood out.
It certainly wasn’t the first effort to try to tell stories
with multimedia. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s mam-
moth “Black Hawk Down” project, back in 1997, was
one of the first to combine audio, video, documents
and other elements with conventional text.
More recently, in 2010, The Washington Post’s Ian
Shapira, told a moving story of a woman’s Facebook
chronicle of her declining health and death after
childbirth by using Facebook’s own features and for-
mat to tell the story. The result still was heavily text-
based, but it demonstrated a creative use of compu-
tational media — the medium became the message.
More ambitiously, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com
has marshaled data to find new ways
to tell stories — although supposed-
ly cutting-edge journalism enter-
prises such as FiveThirtyEight, Vox
and Pierre Omidyar’s First Look still
rely largely on text to get their sto-
ries across. Even something like The
Washington Post’s much-vaunted
new Storyline feature turns out to be
the same-old, same-old presentation
of text, dressed up in a fancy layout.
That’s not enough.
Fortunately, there are other, more advanced exam-
ples of creative use of new journalistic storytelling
tools, especially using computation, data and maps,
though they’re still too few and far between. The
New York Times has a longstanding, regularly up-
dated interactive feature that lets readers simulate
the tough choices need to balance the federal bud-
get. A recent interactive Times feature tracked how
Americans move away from the states in which they
were born. And the Times used an interactive map
to track the dispersal of surplus military equipment
to local police forces, a story that more traditionally
might have been told through inches of dry text and
a few anecdotes.
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© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 38
One of the most ambitious examples of advanced
multimedia storytelling is “Welcome to Pine Point,”
an exploration of a defunct mining town by Canadi-
an documentarians Michael Simons and Paul Shoe-
bridge, in association with the National Film Board
of Canada. Seamlessly blending video, sound, maps,
text, interactivity and other elements, “Welcome to
Pine Point” presents a rich storytelling experience
that makes even “Snow Fall” look traditional. Other
notable recent multimedia efforts include The Guard-
ian’s “Firestorm,” The Tennessean’s “Because of You,”
and PBS/Frontline’s “A Perfect Terrorist,” which uses
video in unusual non-linear and interactive ways.
To be sure, these sorts of ambitious multimedia and
computational storytelling projects are not easy to
create — they require multiple skills (video, audio, pro-
gramming, etc.) and, generally, teams of people. It’s
usually a lot simpler and less expensive to tell a big
story with a few-thousand well-chosen words. And
let’s face it. It’s easy to fall back on the tried and true
text storytelling tricks.
But we’ve got much better tools today. Simulations
and news games can put readers — even that word
implies text-first formats — into the middle of a story,
experiencing and interacting with it directly. Appro-
priate use of tools like data, video and audio, especial-
ly mixed together and with other forms (yes, even
words) can provide a much richer storytelling experi-
ence. If, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thou-
sand words, what’s a video worth? Or a simulation? Or
some other form of multimedia or interaction?
Ironically, as we continue to search for new forms
of storytelling that mix and match these amazing
new tools to create a new vocabulary for sharing
stories, we’re seeing greenshoots of new kinds of
storytelling: the 140 characters of Twitter, used well,
can get across large amounts of information, and en-
courage interaction with the audience that adds to
the story. (Check out one of Silicon Valley magnate
Marc Andreessen’s famous tweetstorms (@pmarca)
to see how a dozen sharp tweets can express deep
thoughts and trigger fascinating discussion.)
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 39
MARK POTTS is a leader in the development of innovative strategies and products in online and print media. He created
one of the first electronic news prototypes in the early 1990s, and then co-founded The Washington Post Co.’s digital divi-
sion. As co-founder of Backfence.com and GrowthSpur, he was a pioneer in the field of hyperlocal news and information.
In 2014, Mark founded Newspeg.com, a visual news-sharing site that has been described as “Pinterest for news.”
Twitter’s value as a
staccato breaking
news bulletin ser-
vice, of course, is
well-known, as was
recently demonstrat-
ed again by dramat-
ic coverage by The
Washington Post’s
@ We s le y L ower y
and others of the
police killing of Mi-
chael Brown and
the subsequent un-
rest in Ferguson,
Mo. Storify collec-
tion of tweets and
liveblogging are other tools
to tell rapidly-changing stories in new ways.
Similarly, lists and slide shows can convey volumes
of info in an economical few lines or clicks. Many
journalists don’t usually think of these as storytelling
media — indeed, we often deride them — but they’re
providing new and entertaining ways to tell tales, as
the success of Buzzfeed and other “listicle” purveyors
demonstrate.
It’s worth noting that online business publica-
tion Quartz recently posted a job opening for a
reporter to create what it called “Things,” ex-
plaining that “’Thing’ is simply our catchall term
for stories that break free of the traditional arti-
cle format to convey information in ways that
work better on the web. Developing those new
storytelling methods — and empowering others to use
them, as well — is the challenge of this job.” Hear hear.
As we continue to explore the new technological tools
available to us, it is likely that new forms of storytell-
ing will emerge and take hold. They may not sup-
plant text, but hopefully they will greatly supplement
it, at the very least. We must recognize that every
subject we cover demands its own unique storytell-
ing. A visual story benefits from visuals rather than
written descriptions. A story based on data needs to
show, rather than tell. Twenty years into the digital
revolution, we’re still trying to invent the best way to
tell stories. As we do, the best of times will be ahead.
Footnote: Josh Stearns, director of journalism and sus-
tainability for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, has
compiled an excellent list of interesting online story-
telling examples over the past couple of years that can
be found here and here.
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M A R K E T I N G
Philip Kotler defined marketing as understand-ing and meeting the needs of customers. This definition of marketing still holds and is more relevant than ever since customers today are far more empowered than before due to enabling technology and services including mobile computing, social networks and assisted search. Marketers must now upgrade their marketing to meet the needs of the empowered age. It is time for empowered marketing for an empowered age. Empowered marketing is one that respects the new capabilities and tools that people have at their disposal and a marketing outlook that leverages these new tools and technologies in ways that transform the way marketing is done.
R I S H A D T O B AC C O WA L A Chief Strategist and member of the Directoire+ Publicis Groupe • @rishad
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications41
T H E DAW N O F A N E W E R A I N M A R K E T I N G
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PUTTING CRAP ON A CLOUD AND
MAKING IT MOBILE AND SERVING IT
WITH PROGRAM-MATIC TECHNOLO-GY STILL DOES NOT CHANGE THE FACT
THAT IT IS CRAP.
I n an empowered age, people are exhibiting dramat-
ically new habits in the way they become aware,
consider, buy and advocate. These new habits sup-
plement and do not necessarily in the near term
replace the ways they traditionally evaluated and
bought products and services. However, in time, we
anticipate that these new behaviors are likely to be-
come dominant.
The three biggest shifts are enhanced expectations, con-
nected experiences and self-marketing.
A simple example of a company that
has both fueled and benefited from
these shifts is Amazon. They both have
created and responded to people’s ex-
pectations for speed, value and service,
seamlessly connected all aspects of the
“marketing funnel” and fed a habit of us
marketing to ourselves as we search,
evaluate and comment on products and
services. Today 30% of all e-commerce
searches start on Amazon versus only 13% on Google.
These trends of self-marketing is fueled also by social
networks, increased expectations by new companies like
Uber, Warby Parker and others that fixate on delighting
people and ensuring that every single experience pre,
during and post experience is tightly linked and seamless.
It is this era that marketers must get prepared for rather
than fixate on the buzzword bingo of “big data”, “cloud”,
“programmatic buying” or conference mumbo jumbo
which sometimes are ingredients to delivery but not the
recipe nor the meal itself.
To thrive in this era marketers must re-consider their
partners, their organizations and even themselves. The
future does not fit in the containers or mindsets of the
past. Putting crap on a cloud and making it mobile and
serving it with programmatic technology still does not
change the fact that it is crap.
The new era requires five key changes.
1. Invest in superior products and services since it is
the best form of marketing. Today in a connected age
with social networks that allow word of mouth at scale,
investing in great products and services is the best mar-
keting investment. You do not want a viral buzz about
your advertising. You want people to
be advocates of your products and ser-
vices. Think less about advertising and
more about utilities, services, employee
training and arming advocates while de-
fanging detractors. Worry about the con-
tent and experience of your marketing
interactions more than fixating on how
cheaply you can distribute these interac-
tions. One superior interaction is worth
many many mediocre ones. Marketing is
moving from wholesale spraying to cus-
tom hand holding. Focus on the poetry of the interaction
and not just the plumbing of the delivery.
2 . Recognize that everything is marketing. In a mobile
age your customer tweets, Instagrams and posts about
every aspect of their service or product experience. If
the hotel room is good but the gym sucks, the world will
know it. If the product is good but the customer support
is not, this will be telegraphed. Ensure that your digital
presence and your analog reality are both world class
and connected. Recognize that the phone in your cus-
tomer’s pocket is really their key interaction in many
ways with your products and services.
3. Make your Brand API Friendly. Brands will matter
more and more in an age of self-marketing, fragmen-
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tation and change. Brands are the ultimate navigation
devices. They are the beacons people will steer by. It is
critical that your company and your brand are easy to
access, connect and collaborate with in a connected age.
Is it easy to find on search engines, is it easy to engage
with on social networks, is the data and experiences on
your website modular and distribut-
ed, are components of your product
and service developed in ways that
your customers and other distribu-
tors can incorporate them into their
marketing. Can customers easily
understand the authenticity, values
and purpose of your company and
its people?
4. Get real. The new stuff is difficult
and requires new skills. It has been
20 years since the Netscape Browser
and the start of digital marketing. Consumers in many
markets have so absorbed technology and devices into
the way they shop and behave that some marketers
have begun to believe that the “digital” era is over since
it should now be all merged again. We hear “digital first”
and “digital at the core” loudest from those who are the
least digital. Digital is not just about technology. Digital
is a mindset. It is about a whole new way of thinking
about marketing. It is a world where brands matter, in-
sights matter and storytelling matters. BUT the way
brands are built, stories shared and insights extracted
and leveraged are different! Yes BRANDS. Yes STORY-
TELLING. Yes INSIGHTS. But NO to the same way of do-
ing things in a connected, empowered, self-marketing,
mobile age where commerce will be baked into more
and more marketing interactions.
The new stuff is hard. It’s difficult. It requires technology
and coding and new organizations
and measurement and partnerships
as well as brands and insight and sto-
rytelling.
5. Marketing is a growth game not
a share game. For too long, market-
ers and agencies have defined them-
selves too narrowly in categories as
product companies or service com-
panies. As media agencies or cre-
ative agencies or promotion agencies
or PR agencies. All these definitions
were before we entered into an age of digital leakage
where media and creative and technology blend, where
barriers between industries leak, where service and
product congeal. Where the world for marketers include
the worlds of commerce, content and more. Where Goo-
gle and Facebook and Twitter are not threats but great
opportunities and stairways to new markets. It’s an era
to think with a fresh sheet of paper and with courage.
To attract, retain and grow amazing talent.
It’s an age of abundance where talent and time is short.
So get learning, get partnering and get going.
YES BRANDS. YES STORYTELLING. YES
INSIGHTS. BUT NO TO THE SAME WAY OF DOING THINGS IN A CONNECTED,
EMPOWERED, SELF-MARKETING, MOBILE AGE WHERE COMMERCE WILL
BE BAKED INTO MORE AND MORE MARKETING
INTERACTIONS.
RISHAD TOBACCOWALA is Chief Strategist and member of the Directoire+ of Publicis Groupe, the world’s third largest
communication firm. He was most recently the Chairman of DigitasLBi and Razorfish, two global firms owned by the Publi-
cis Groupe focused on marketing and business transformation. Rishad was also the Chief Strategy and Innovation officer of
VivaKi, a global leader in digital advertising solutions. He has 33 years of experience in marketing and has worked, helped
grow, founded/co-founded or incubated for a variety of companies including Leo Burnett, Starcom, SMG Next, Starcom
IP, Giant Step, Play, and Denuo.
The marketing landscape has
changed exponentially over the
last decade as both marketers
and consumers have become
more sophisticated, technolog-
ically adept, price smart and
also conscious of the impact
of having a good reputation.
K E V I N R O B E R T S CEO Worldwide • Saatchi & Saatchi@KRConnect
“ E M OT I O N A L F U L F I L L M E N T,
N OT T EC H N O LO GY, W I L L B E T H E STA N D
O U T O F F E R I N G O F A W I N N I N G B R A N D”
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 44
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THE PATH FOR MAR-KETERS WANTING TO
KINDLE BRAND POWER AND LOYALTY HAS LESS TO DO WITH FUNCTION-AL ELEMENTS SUCH AS DISTRIBUTION AND AD-VERTISING, AND MORE
TO DO WITH EMOTIONAL FULFILLMENT.
T echnology has reset the value equa-
tion across the spectrum of audience
engagement. Power has switched
from the supply side to the demand
side of commerce, disrupting the
one-way brand model that focused
on winning minds. Technology + cre-
ativity is transforming every industry – retail, finance,
logistics, manufacturing, energy, transport, food, edu-
cation – delivering power and wonder to the audience
at digital speed.
People have the world at their fin-
gertips and at the command of
their voice. Far from being reliant on
brands to manage the information
tsunami, people know how to get
what they want – and fast! Brands
that manipulate, under-deliver or
over-price get seen through instant-
ly. Contrary to popular thinking that
people are overwhelmed by infor-
mation, consumers are extremely
savvy navigators and have no hesi-
tation about consulting reviews, comparing prices and
checking social media currency. The consumer cycle
is: see it; search it; shop it; share it.
The tech-led empowerment of customers will only
grow as the ‘Internet of Things’ connects everything
to everyone, driving down the marginal cost of produc-
tion and distribution, just as technology has done with
the supply of information.
In this always-on, impulse-led, instant Age of Now,
brands, choices and deals are prolific for brand-fa-
tigued, tech-enabled and ‘entitled’ consumers. Con-
sumers expect more for less, and can switch faster.
Brands are under siege, finding it ever harder to com-
mand premiums and retain loyalty. Only 23 percent
of consumers in a 2012 Corporate Executive Board
study said they have a relationship with a brand. An-
other study showed the majority of people worldwide
wouldn’t care if more than 73 percent of brands disap-
peared tomorrow.
The days when marketers could look forward to the
majority of customers coming back to the showroom
for a repeat buy are largely gone for most (but not all)
brands. According to research in 1980, 80 percent of
U.S. auto purchases were made by repeat customers;
by 2009 the figure had plummeted
to 20 percent (CNW). In an August
2014 study, only three brands – Toy-
ota, Honda and Ford – kept at least 50
percent of their customers coming
back on average (Kelley).
Is this the end of brands? Does the
march of technology condemn
brands to a low-margin battle of at-
trition? For attention grabbers, yes.
Brands still have to be created today,
but this is a table stake. The path for marketers wanting
to kindle brand power and loyalty has less to do with
functional elements such as distribution and advertis-
ing, and more to do with emotional fulfillment. Brands
have to show truth and engage deep. The have to make
the leap from being trusted, liked and admired – to being
loved.
Emotional expectations of brands are on the rise.
Consumers are asking “how does this brand improve
my life?” and “how do I feel about this brand?” There
is a thirst for authentic connections. Passive consum-
ers are being replaced by active brand voters who
opt into a brand ethos that meshes emotionally with
their own lives.
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THE IRONY IS THAT WHILE LOYALTY WAS NEVER
EASIER TO LOSE, IT HAS NEVER BEEN EASIER TO WIN FOR A BRAND THAT IS EMOTIONALLY-TUNED, EMOTIONALLY-CAPABLE
AND EMOTIONALLY- EXECUTED.
People want to be involved in the story, whether it’s the
middle, end or the beginning. This applies East to West.
Chinese consumer spending is expected to grow from
$2.03 trillion in 2010 to $6.18 trillion annually in 2020,
a threefold jump (Boston Consulting Group). In 2013, a
major study of consumer behavior in Tier 1 to 4 cities in
China involving 22 product categories found that emo-
tional factors ranked first as a reason to buy for more
than half of the categories considered. And another
2013 study about direct marketers looking for ways to
tap into a receptive audience of eager television view-
ers concluded that consumers with
a strong emotional connection to a
brand are 47 percent more likely to
contribute revenue.
Focusing on emotion makes perfect
sense. Psychologists like Nobel Eco-
nomics laureate Daniel Kahneman
have shown how people are not ra-
tional decision makers. The Canadian
neurologist Donald Calne encapsu-
lates “the essential difference between emotion and rea-
son is that emotion leads to action while reason leads to
conclusions.”
Emotional fulfillment, not technology, will be the stand-
out offering of a winning brand. People like technology
– but people mostly really like other people. The more
digital life gets, the more people will value being under-
stood, touched and involved by other people. The brands
that win will be real and personable – whether it’s a live
person on screen, a physical store interaction or the mass
intimacy of a stadium event, football to rock.
And Big Data? Is it the new nirvana, the perfect market-
ing moment? Gartner has said that by 2017 the CMO will
spend more on IT than the CIO. Good luck to the new ‘Chief
Metric Officer,’ unless she or he is also a ‘Chief Magic Offi-
cer,’ because magic will always need to be sprinkled. Big
Data needs Big Emotion, because algorithms will never
read and respond to humans the way humans do. The
Big Data machine can read the lines, but not between
them. Relevance is one thing, irresistibility is another. Big
Data can turn up at the perfect moment, but not ignite
it. It can spit out stories based on what came before, but
it can’t dream the difference and feel the empathy that
builds billion-dollar loved brands.
Big Data and Big Emotion have to join forces, not fight
each other. For example, Saatchi &
Saatchi works with Hotspex in Toron-
to with their heatmap-based Emo-
tional Measurement Technology to
find the emotional space a brand
will grow in and to get an emotional
balance sheet to see strengths, op-
portunities, weaknesses and paths
to avoid. With Protobrand in Boston
we have just developed Lovemark-
er 2.0 which has identified the eight
critical factors that lead to brand respect — for example
competence, innovation and social and environmental
responsibility — and the seven critical factors that lead
to brand love — for example desire, connection, devo-
tion and exclusivity.
Here are five keys for businesses and brands to get to the
future first:
BE A CREATIVE LEADER
Cultures that have the most ideas are best placed to win,
because creativity has unreasonable power. Ideas have
re-framing power, talking power and sharing power.
Old world power, scale and money have been eclipsed
by the velocity of ideas. Winning as a brand demands
a climate where creativity can thrive, where diversity
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is standard and where ideas fly in all directions all of
the time. There is a dream in full view for everyone to
reach for. Creativity and innovation are in everyone’s
job description, and the crazies and misfits (especially
the loyalists, the fans) get a seat at the decision table.
Everyone on the production team gets responsibility,
learning, recognition and joy in equal measure. This is
the blueprint for Creative Leadership.
BE PARTICIPATORY
The more that brands bring their consumers, custom-
ers and partners into their secret garden, the greater
the rewards that will flow back in, and the bigger the
garden will grow. The new ROI is Return on Involve-
ment, and the fan base is critical. Fans are not usually a
numerically significant percentage of a brand’s overall
buyers but have outsize impact on building a winning
brand. This is about influencers, shared values, inspir-
ing community, word of mouth, creating movements,
co-creating and story sharing. To reorder a classic line
of the late great Steve Jobs: Amazing. Click. Boom!
BE VISUAL
More than 50 percent of the cortex, the surface of the
brain, is devoted to processing visual information. Imag-
es, Instagram and infographics are becoming hot proper-
ties in the information-tsunami for good reason. People
today are aesthetically adept; they process images thou-
sands of times faster than text, and love to share cool im-
agery. We are drawn to beauty and universality.
BE FAST
Priceless value arrives on time and whether we’re
talking curing killer diseases or simply feeding the kids,
there is less time available for people than ever. Across
production, distribution and communication, brands
have a need for speed. Tom Peters summarizes the way
to win: “Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast.”
BE EMOTIONAL
Emotion is the primary key to winning on the road
ahead, and in the technological century, the potential
for a brand to deliver on heightened emotional demands
is greater than ever. There is extraordinary capacity to
understand people, interact, customize, personalize and
touch lives.
The irony is that while loyalty was never easier to
lose, it has never been easier to win for a brand that is
emotionally-tuned, emotionally-capable and emotion-
ally-executed. The commercial opportunity is not just
to drive repeat sales but also to command premiums,
build share and extend range.
Brands are becoming human relationships, and the
strongest relationships have mystery, sensuality and
intimacy, the stuff we care about. The more empathy,
magic and love that brands stream out, the more that
comes back in a multiplier effect. This is about more
than irreplaceability. It is about irresistibility, a brand
with Loyalty Beyond Reason – a Lovemark.
KEVIN ROBERTS is the New York-based CEO Worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi – one of the world’s leading creative organizations
and part of Publicis Groupe, the world’s third largest communications group. He took up his position as CEO Worldwide with
Saatchi & Saatchi in 1997, and will move to the position of Executive Chairman in January 2015. In 2004, he wrote Lovemarks: the
Future Beyond Brands, a ground-breaking business book published in 18 languages, showing how emotion can inspire businesses
and brands to deliver sustainable value. Lovemarks was named one of the ten Ideas of the Decade by Advertising Age in 2009. He
has just published a 10,000 word “Red Paper” Brand Loyalty Reloaded, which can be found at saatchikevin.com.
It’s an interesting wrinkle in time for the
colliding worlds of advertising and digital
empowerment. Exactly 20 years ago I
was part of the team that sold the very
first banner ads on the World Wide Web.
On 10/27/94, Wired Magazine flipped the
switch that lit up HotWired, the “cybersta-
tion” that ushered brands like IBM, Volvo,
MCI, Club Med and – famously – AT&T into
the digital age. From the humble origin of
a dozen brands paying $15,000 per month
for static banner placement with zero
analytics, web advertising is closing in
on $50 billion in annual spending.
D O U G W E A V E R Founder, Upstream Group • @UpstreamDW
D O N ’ T C A L L I T A DV E RT I S I N G A NYM O R E
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WHAT WILL CREATE THE NEXT GREAT WAVE OF GROWTH FOR THE AD-
VERTISING BUSINESS? I BELIEVE IT WILL HAPPEN ONLY BY CONFRONTING
THE TRUTH THAT AD-VERTISING IN A DIGITAL WORLD MATTERS MOST WHEN IT LEAST RESEM-
BLES ADVERTISING.
A t precisely the same moment,
the banner ad (and related forms
like the 15-second video pre-roll
and the mobile display ad) has
become a social touchstone
that evokes a firestorm of con-
descension and condemnation
at every turn. Indeed, the 20th anniversary of web ad-
vertising has mobilized the kill-the-banner crowd like
so many pitchfork-wielding peasants out to stop Dr.
Frankenstein. To the casual observer this all may seem
a bit schizophrenic: Can the digital ad
business really have been built and
sustained on top of such a flawed de-
livery vehicle? And if web advertising
techniques are really so ham-handed,
why are they now being co-opted
by the behemoth of television in the
forms of screen overlays, dynamic ad
serving and programmatic distribu-
tion?
Interesting questions indeed. But
they are also the wrong questions.
Over my 20 very active years serv-
ing media companies other digital and traditional ad-
vertising players, I’ve had a front row seat for a show
that is consistently mistranslated, misdiagnosed and
misunderstood. Digital advertising was born to an inter-
net that people read and watched. During that seminal
period of tiny gif images and narrow, scrolling columns
of type we started calling those who put content on the
web “publishers” – a role that was even then retiring to a
world of hagiographic nostalgia. And advertising – well,
that was a science to be grafted onto the web from oth-
er forms of publishing and broadcasting as technology
and bandwidth allowed. Those first crude banners were
nothing more than outdoor ads writ small. That they
gave way eventually to larger, more picturesque ‘mag-
azine’ ads and then to TV-style video spots meant more
and more growth, but it also continued to miss the larg-
er point that defines the true value of digitization – and
lights our path for what happens now.
Let’s be honest in admitting that we haven’t really been
all that much of a literary culture for much of the last 50
years and the internet doesn’t change that. You’re now
just over 400 words into this essay:
statistically, it’s already one of the lon-
gest things most American’s will read
on the internet today. Over these two
decades, the web has become some-
thing everyone does – not something
they watch or read. We look for an-
swers, we pass jokes back and forth to
one another, we settle arguments. We
preen and strut, we compare and buy,
we “snack” on short bits of video. We
organize things, we plan projects, we
opine. Does this mean that content no
longer matters? Or that it matters more than ever? The
maddeningly simple answer is that it matters when it
matters; when it’s closely aligned with the experience
the consumer is living at that moment in time. And not
for its own sake.
This leads me to the crossroads confronting those
who aim to create the next $50 billion of revenue
through “digital advertising” and for the advertising
industry as a whole. The rocket ride from 1994 to 2014
has been driven by a combination of shifting consum-
er behavior (the increased time spent on browsers and
devices is inescapable even to the staunchest tradi-
tional media die hard) and our ability to efficiently “tag
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© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 50
along” with the experiences consumers are choosing
to create for themselves digitally. Always on, always
in our hands, the internet has become an extension of
us as people. But advertising, mostly, has not kept up.
Two dominant trends in digital advertising today are
data optimization and the programmatic trading of
advertising display opportunities. In the first, we are
overlaying information to identify and make decisions
about those who we might show our ads to. In the sec-
ond, we are building the technology and functionality
to trade “ad futures” with one another. Both of these are
critically important, “hard trends,” and they’ll continue
– to some point – to usher more dollars into digital chan-
nels. But they are also both exercises in division and re-
duction: help me show my ad to fewer of the people who
don’t matter; help me buy fewer of the ads that don’t work
or don’t’ matter.
So what, then, will create the next great wave of growth
for the advertising business? I believe it will happen
only by confronting the truth that advertising in a dig-
ital world matters most when it least resembles adver-
tising. Google and (to a lesser and less consistent de-
gree) Facebook start the value creation at the point of
consumer action and intent. The form that “advertising”
takes is malleable and built into the experience: a help-
ful suggestion via some text as they answer my search
query; a post from a marketer on a topic around which
I’m already active. Buzzfeed has made a huge splash by
helping marketers create just the kind of snackable con-
tent-McNuggets that we already like to trade with one
another across the very platforms — Facebook, Twitter,
Tumblr – where we already trade them.
But this is the tip of the iceberg. Many current tech-
niques will look as archaic in 2024 as the earliest ban-
ners look today. But the companies and leaders who will
endure and thrive are those who consistently answer a
different set of questions: What is the consumer doing
today with digital tools and how can I help her do it bet-
ter? How might we create new value by blending discov-
ery, commerce and productivity into a new experience
shared by consumer and marketer?
If there were no such thing as an “advertising budget,”
how would we create a connection between consum-
ers and brands, companies and products that can bring
new value into the consumer’s life?
These are the questions to be confronted not only by
“digital advertising” leaders; after all, what advertising
will not be digital by the time we reach our next ten year
milestone? No, this is the existential moment for all of
what used to be called Madison Avenue and “the Media.”
Because when Wired flipped that switch 20 years ago
they also set in motion a chain of events that prompts
the re-imagination of all advertising.
From this point forward, don’t call any of it advertising. It
will either be something much, much bigger – or it will
be background noise.
DOUG WEAVER is a highly-regarded strategist and opinion leader in the world of online advertising. Over the past 16 years he’s
worked with more than 600 leading companies, including Facebook, Yahoo!, Apple, Fox Sports, USA TODAY, CBS Digital Media,
YuMe, The Wall Street Journal, NBC Universal, National Public Radio, Tremor Media, ESPN, About.com and The New York Times.
Much of the digital content industry is lost
today in discussions about the blurred line
between publisher and advertiser — otherwise
known as the divide between church and
state. Questions revolve around concerns
about consumers’ ability to distinguish
editorial from advertising content, whether
they understand an ad is not necessarily an
editorial endorsement, and what happens if
they lose faith in the content publishers
work so hard to produce.
J A S O N K I N T CEO, Digital Content Next • @jason_kint
W E N E E D A N E W “ C H U R C H A N D
STAT E ” I N D I G I TA L P U B L I S H I N G
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© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 52
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FOOL CONSUMERS ONE TOO MANY
TIMES AND THEIR TRUST IS BROKEN,
SERIOUSLY DAMAG-ING THE CREDIBILITY OF BOTH EDITORIAL
AND MARKETING CONTENT.
Though these are legitimate con-
cerns, the line between media
and marketer has already blurred
as brands like Red Bull and Kraft
excel in the art of creating media,
while media outlets like the New
York Times and Vox perfect the
craft of brand content. In this new reality, it’s not the
re-building of a crumbled wall between editor and
publisher that’s needed but the rais-
ing of a new kind of wall, one which
separates click-bait from bona fide
content.
Whether they’re brands or publish-
ers, what motivates content produc-
ers to go to great lengths to produce
high-quality content day after day
is the need to engage consumers
in meaningful ways. Holding con-
sumers’ attention, maximizing the
amount of time they spend with the brand, and
provoking the kind of emotion that spurs repeat
visits which translate into brand loyalty requires
content producers to consistently offer substantive,
smartly packaged ideas consumers can relate to
and interact with.
But blended into the competitive mix is a host of
shadier players who survive by capitalizing on the
consumer trust which publishers and marketers so
painstakingly build. For these “trust parasites” who
have optimized themselves to a single purpose — the
one-time click — the kind of authentic engagement
(consumer time spent, attention gained and emo-
tion aroused) which benefits both consumer and ad-
vertiser is wholly irrelevant. By combining endless
tracking data with the ping of an advertising server,
with no regard for the value of the consumer rela-
tionship, trust parasites are able to eat up a dispro-
portionate share of the digital advertising pie.
Though purveyors of trust parasitism may claim
their practice hurts no one (and some may even go
out on a limb to say it offers some kind of benefit), in
truth these kinds of practices threat-
en to undermine the bond between
consumer and content that serves
as the backbone of the marketing
ecosystem. Fool consumers one too
many times and their trust is broken,
seriously damaging the credibility of
both editorial and marketing content.
The real “church and state” question
facing us today is not how we keep
advertisers and publishers apart but
how we keep quality and credibility quarantined
from the damaging effects of parasitic click-chasers.
We see this challenge play out almost every day in
native advertising, where producers of high-qual-
ity content are unfairly associated with pernicious
practices like camouflaging paid ads as recommen-
dations (e.g. “You may also like…”) optimized not to
provide benefit to the reader but for the sole purpose
of garnering one more click.
It’s clear that the industry needs a framework to
establish a new divide. Recent research, like Digital
Content Next’s newly released study, shows that
time-based metrics can provide a more accurate as-
sessment of engagement by measuring the amount
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 53
JASON KINT is the chief executive of Digital Content Next, a trade association that exclusively serves the diverse needs of
digital content companies that manage direct, trusted relationships with consumers and marketers. A 20-year veteran of the
digital media industry, he previously led the evolution of CBS Sports into a multi-platform brand offering premier broadcast,
online and mobile sports content as SVP and General Manager of CBS Interactive’s Sports Division.
of time a consumer spends with a brand, as opposed
to the number of clicks it gets. With 80 percent of
digital publishers saying they are interested in buy-
ing and selling ads based on these metrics, this is an
encouraging development.
Much like the wall between church and state, the
new wall of quality content will have to be re-built
every day as unique cases and circumstances arise.
But unlike the old wall, this wall will need advertis-
ers, publishers and consumers to cooperate in order
to create and maintain it. Only this kind of mutual
insistence on quality can ensure the industry con-
tinues to produce the energy source which keeps
our proverbial lights on — the quality content people
trust and value.
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M E T R I C S
On July 5, 1989, a pilot episode of a new sitcom
called The Seinfeld Chronicles aired on NBC.
It received good, but not great, ratings for
the time, coming in second on the night
overall. The network debated whether or not
to purchase more episodes; during testing,
audiences did not understand this program’s
format or connect with its characters, and
network executives’ previous experiences told
them it would skew to a small, urban audience
and never reach national popularity.
M A T T B O G G I E Executive Director, Research and Development, The New York Times • @mattboggie
C H AS I N G C L I C K S : M ET R I C S S H O U L D S U P P O RT
A ST R AT EGY, N OT B E A ST R AT EGY
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 55
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WHETHER A STORY IS SPREAD THROUGH PRINT,
WEBSITES, MOBILE AP-PLICATIONS, OR WATCH-
SIZED GLANCES, IT IS THE QUALITY OF THE STORY AND THE CLARITY WITH WHICH IT’S TOLD THAT REACHES HEARTS AND
CHANGES MINDS.
O n the back of a gut feeling
about the show’s potential, one
executive took it upon himself
to rearrange his own budget,
even canceling a planned Bob
Hope special, to purchase four
more episodes of the show.
They didn’t air until nearly a year later, and the show
took another three years to become a critical success.
Seinfeld went on to air 180 episodes
over nine years, and garner the
highest advertising rates for any
television show, a record it held for
five years after it ended. It supported
NBC’s programming on Thursday
nights for nearly a decade, providing
a launching point for programs like
ER, Friends and Mad About You. And
it took knowing how to interpret,
and even ignore, the data at hand
and instead understand how the
audience and the network’s goals
could converge in this new product.
Much has been made of new capabilities — often
more imagined than available — to track each and ev-
ery reader, guiding them to the very thing they most
want to see. Companies from analytics firms to ad
targeting systems to algorithmic content creators use
the “power of Big Data” to promise hyper-personalized
information delivery. And publishers are doing every-
thing they can to optimize their experiences to wring
out more clicks and more time-on-site, the two num-
bers most sought after by their advertisers.
Lost in this discussion, however, are two key problems:
1. This is all about to get a lot more complicated.
Publishers have been struggling with the web ever
since the browser was created. Subscriber numbers
have fallen, print advertising rates have plummeted,
and where publishers have been successful in shift-
ing readers and ads onto digital platforms, the revenue
gained usually falls far short of making up the print
losses. This has accelerated as mobile browsing be-
comes more and more important: right now, fully half
of Americans under 30 use their
mobile device as their primary In-
ternet device, yet very few providers
can find a way to create valuable ad
presentations here. This struggle
will increase as experiences with
smaller, or no, visual elements are
increasingly adopted. The industry
has barely gotten to a place where
it can understand the data behind
the current two or three platforms
it supports now, and certainly has
no idea how to measure a reader’s
interest in a report on Google Glass or on the Moto 360.
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 57
Further, publication timelines have gone from very
discrete — one paper per day, or magazine per week or
month — to continuous, where breaking news alerts
are pushed before an article is even written; where
sites, apps and pages are updated hundreds of times
per day, often by algorithms as much as by people;
and where readers are in constant motion, changing
their needs, context and capabilities in the process.
Isolating variables in an environment
like this is a superhuman challenge:
did my story get more views because
of something I did, or because of some
externality? Are more people spending
longer on this story because it’s com-
pelling, or because it’s dense or long? If
a story gets thousands of views, does
that really mean it will have the im-
pact we want it to?
In the far more complex publishing en-
vironment coming in the next few years, one metric,
or even a handful, won’t be enough. Different metrics
by platform, use case, and device — some of which
may be more anecdotal or sample-based than cen-
sus-driven — will be required, and optimizing for those
metrics could be as hard as selecting them and mea-
suring them in the first place.
2. Even if we get the measurement right, we seem to
be missing the point.
In many cases, the organizations struggling most with
“engagement” are those that have decades — even
centuries — of experience telling compelling stories.
Why are they struggling with this new requirement
to measure the performance of those stories in simple
terms?
Unfortunately, the answer is simple: the critical met-
ric of most journalism organizations is the impact of
a story or a service, and measuring that is a very dif-
ferent (and far less scientific) exercise from measuring
“engagement” through pages viewed or time spent,
and sometimes, measuring impact and engagement
are two different goals.
“Time spent” on a story is not necessarily related to
its cultural import, its reach, or its
ability to change a user’s mind. These
are — and have always been — the
things we all most want to measure,
and the things hardest to measure
about journalism. Whether a story is
spread through print, websites, mobile
applications, or watch-sized glances, it
is the quality of the story and the clar-
ity with which it’s told that reaches
hearts and changes minds.
The good news, however, is that the remedy is sim-
ple, and does make use of new technologies and tech-
niques to reach readers, whether you’re in the news-
room or the ad agency:
SHOW PEOPLE THE GOOD WORK YOU DO
This should be the sole motivation behind engage-
ment, user measurement, audience development, or
whatever other buzzword names this practice might
acquire. The purpose of learning more about your
readers and how they find you is to reach them more
repeatably, more often, and to reach more of them to-
morrow than you did today.
This should just be called what it is: “marketing.”
Publishers want to trade a reader’s time for the in-
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IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX MARKET,
ANALYTICS AND MEASUREMENT
SHOULD BE USED TO REFINE AND
CORRECT YOUR MES-SAGE, NOT TO
DECIDE WHAT TO SAY.
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 58
formation they provide, time that the reader now
can spend in dozens of different ways, most of which
have nothing to do with journalism. Convincing a
reader to spend their time with your piece (article,
video, game, podcast, etc.) requires convincing them.
Find your readers in other places they read, commu-
nicate with them using as many channels as you
can in a language they understand, and use the data
at your disposal to tailor those efforts.
DO GOOD WORK
Marketing to a reader, and convincing them to come
read or watch or otherwise consume your work, is a
form of a promise: “if you give me a few minutes, I’ll
give you something worth your time.” Some of the
techniques typically used to “engage” a new audi-
ence fracture that promise: refactoring headlines for
better SEO or reposting old content as new because
of a timely hook, for example, may draw a reader in
with a promise the piece can’t fulfill.
Often lost in the discussion of social measurement
tools, audience metrics, SEO techniques and market-
ing strategies is the importance of the quality of the
content itself; this does a huge disservice to what
is arguably the single-best audience development
technique there is. Making content with which peo-
ple want to spend time is critically important. Telling
stories in new ways, from new perspectives and with
new voices, helps build trust in a publisher’s brand
so that the next enticement a reader is presented is
more likely to be acted upon.
More to the point, however, creating good work is far
more a function of the gut than the head. Editors are
looked to for their judgment on what story is import-
ant to tell, where to give emphasis, how to clearly
explain using text, photo, graphics, and video. Data
should be used sparingly here, and should be used
to refine, not override, the instincts of a newsroom.
The research and investigations we do in The New
York Times R&D Lab point to a landscape of increas-
ing reader choice, complexity of presentation, and re-
finement in data collection and analysis techniques.
The organizations that adapt best to these changes
will be those that use them to support a clear, con-
cise strategy driven by their mission and values, not
those that use them to try and guide their path. In
an increasingly complex market, analytics and mea-
surement should be used to refine and correct your
message, not to decide what to say.
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MATT BOGGIE is an Executive Director in The New York Times Company’s Research and Development group. As the lab is
tasked with “looking around corners” and describing the future of media and information distribution, Mr. Boggie is respon-
sible for researching and developing points of view on trends in media production and consumption, identifying phenomena
worth further study, and shaping the development of new prototypes and applications the lab uses to educate and inspire.
He recently oversaw completion of the Listening Table, a piece of furniture that helps document the conversations that occur
around it, and the development of Streamtools, an open-source tool for consuming and analyzing live streams of informa-
tion with a minimal amount of coding. Prior to joining the Times Company, Mr. Boggie was a senior manager with Accenture,
working in consumer product design and strategy in the Media and Entertainment segment.
It’s uncommon to hear of any news or
content organization without an analytics
system of some sort, or many sorts, in place.
In fact, investment in analytics is predicted
to go up, but the goals of the investments
are sometimes unclear. What do companies
really want out of having analytics? Bigger
numbers to report? More detailed reports to
share? There’s a crucial gap between that
investment and the goal, and not many
companies are talking about it.
S A C H I N K A M D A R CEO, Parse.ly
T H E D I S CO N N EC T B ET W E E N
A N A LY T I C S A N D E N G AG E M E N T :
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 59
HOW PUBLISHERS CAN BRIDGE THE GAP
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 60
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DATA AND ANALYTICS ARE THE NEW GUTEN-BERG PRESS: A WHOLE PARADIGM SHIFT FOR
HOW PUBLISHING WORKS. WITHOUT
IT, OTHER COMPANIES MAKE MONEY OFF OF THE CONTENT
YOU PRODUCE.
How does getting access to data
translate into company success
for a publisher?
The promise of it has excited the
industry. Promising “attention”
and “engagement” measurement
and action spurs pockets to open and saviors of the
web to be heralded, but measurement in and of itself is
only a different type of data, and with varying sources
and types of metrics, it’s rare that
it’s even useful for anything but the
most general of comparisons or a
reporter’s instant gratification.
In the larger tech environment,
data is not used to only measure
engagement; it’s used to spur it.
Teams get access to data so they
can make changes that increase
log-ins for an app, that create fea-
tures that users will interact with
more and that produce products
(ads) that users are more likely to see and click on
in Facebook, Twitter or Google. The companies doing
this are the same companies taking dollars out of
the pockets of publishers, often while they use much
of the content created by those publishers.
Which should indicate to publishers one unavoidable
fact: to compete, you have to be able to use the data
available to do more than measure; you have to use
it to power your organizations. Data and analytics
are the new Gutenberg Press: a whole paradigm shift
for how publishing works. Without it, other compa-
nies make money off of the content you produce.
Some publishers, particularly newer outlets unen-
cumbered by legacies of print products or business
structures have quickly embraced this. But seeing
revenue free-fall makes even the largest organiza-
tions take notice and makes them willing to steer
their ships towards calmer waters.
The oft-quoted New York Times’ Innovation Report
was more than just a list of strategies and initiatives;
it was a glimpse at their shift as they start to use
data to guide company decisions.
They discussed (among other
things) three areas where they see
opportunities based on data they
already have, but they missed a
major part of the story by not dis-
cussing how to use the data going
forward. Here’s our take on how
The New York Times (and other
media organizations) can use an-
alytics to take advantage of these
business opportunities.
1. Opportunity: Evergreen Discovery
From the report: “A new approach would be to take
cultural and life-style content — about books, mu-
seums, food, theater — and organize it more by rele-
vance than by publication date.”
The report discusses ways that the Times can build
better pages and surface content that readers might
still find interesting and useful. Making it easy for
readers to find existing content reduces editorial ef-
fort while increasing readership and utility for the
reader, a win-win for all involved. We’ve found that
on Parse.ly’s network of hundreds of news and me-
dia sites the average site has 11 percent of its page
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 61
views coming from evergreen posts, so it’s certainly
something most people can take advantage of.
NEXT STEP: DON’T LEAVE EVERGREEN IN THE
PAST — USE IT TO GUIDE THE FUTURE.
The evergreen opportunity looks at content that has
already been created and discusses how to make the
most of it. But how does it help the publishers go-
ing forward? Information on what
makes these posts different can be
a powerful way to learn more about
your readers and what they’re inter-
ested in consistently hearing about.
It also provides a way for an edito-
rial team to quickly see stories and
topics readers are already familiar
with, which means looking at ever-
green content and examining what
made it successful should be con-
sidered a crucial part of creating
new content. We recommend reviewing evergreen
content on a monthly basis among an editorial team.
If a new story is coming out that happens on annual
basis (college football, anyone?) find out if past cov-
erage resulted in evergreen stories and see where
those readers are coming from. Can you use the ex-
isting evergreen traffic to boost future readership?
2. Opportunity: Front-line Promotion
From the report: “One approach would be to create
an ‘impact tool-box’ and train an editor on each desk
to use it. The toolbox would provide strategy, tactics
and templates for increasing the reach of an article
before and after it’s published.”
The New York Times recognizes how important data
and analytics, along with social media and distribu-
tion, are for reaching a modern audience. Starting
to build that awareness into the corporate culture
plays a key role in the success of making all of these
suggestions work, and having on-the-floor evange-
lists certainly increases the likelihood of the culture
catching on.
Next step: Make it easier for
everyone to participate in the
culture shift.
Telling people things are import-
ant, and actually allowing them
to experience it for themselves
are vastly different learning
methods. For newsrooms to re-
ally see metrics and analytics
as more than a measurement
or tool, and actually as an in-
sight into their audience and
a precursor to action from their staff, newsrooms
have to think about integrating it into the workflow
through CMS integrations, big-board screens, on-
page extensions and more. Our users spend 36,000
minutes in Parse.ly every day which shows there’s
an appetite for understanding; newsrooms just
have to provide context for it.
3. Opportunity: User-Generated Content
From the report: “We should experiment with ex-
panding our Op-Ed offerings to include specific
sections and verticals, opening up our report to
leaders in the fields such as politics, business and
culture.”
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WHEN YOU CAN CREATE THIS CONNECTION, YOU CAN BUILD STRONGER RELATIONSHIPS AND ADD VALUE, WHICH
ALLOWS FOR GREATER OPPORTUNITIES LIKE
SUBSCRIPTIONS, CONTRI-BUTIONS, PLEDGES OR
EVENT TICKETS.
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 62
When someone spends their time creating work for
any outlet, whether it’s Facebook or your publication,
they’re creating a connection with the brand. When
you can create this connection, you can build stron-
ger relationships and add value, which allows for
greater opportunities like subscriptions, contribu-
tions, pledges or event tickets.
Next step: Give something back to the people
creating content for you.
People can distribute their content anywhere online
today, from Twitter to Medium to self-publishing eb-
ooks. If they create content on your platform or for
your publication, they’re also hoping to get some-
thing out of their effort: recognition, feedback, or
action. They’re going to want and expect some sort
of engagement, not just from readers, but from you
– the publisher — that other third-party applications
provide. The feeling you get from someone retweet-
ing you? You can replicate that by offering them ac-
cess to audience feedback to their work.
The Times concluded their report with a call for an
internal group that would oversee these digital ini-
tiatives. Hopefully, that group, along with teams
throughout publishing companies will be quick to
recognize that the future of digital media isn’t going
to be measured by analytics, it’s going to be created
by the insights we get out of them. We’re excited to
see what happens!
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SACHIN KAMDAR is chief executive officer of Parse.ly which partners with digital publishers to provide audience insights
through an analytics platform. Sachin graduated with a bachelor’s in Economics from NYU and a master’s in Education from
Pace University. After graduating from NYU, Sachin was an NYC Teaching Fellow, using cutting edge technology to educate
students in math and economics at an alternative high school in Brownsville, Brooklyn. He then started an EdTech consulting
company that built, implemented and managed systems across schools in NYC.
There’s significant momentum for publish-
ers toward increasing the production of video
content, on account of both the strength of
video as a medium for storytelling and high
video CPMs as advertisers begin to move their
TV spends online (see the Chicago Tribune’s
coverage for one example). An increase in video
content across the board, of course, means that
it’s all the more important that we have a sense
of which parts of our audience we can hope to
reach with video. To that end, below is a brief
survey of the state of online audiences and
their consumption of video.
J O S H S C H W A R T Z Chief Data Scientist, Chartbeat • @joshuadschwartz
V I D EO P R O D U C T I O N I S O N
T H E R I S E – B U T W H O’ S WATC H I N G?
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© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 64
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VARIATIONS IN VIDEO CON-SUMPTION BY
DEVICE ARE COMPOUNDED
BY DEVICE USAGE PATTERNS
THROUGHOUT THE DAY.
W hen a visitor lands
on a text-based ar-
ticle, in almost all
circumstances they
read some portion of
the article’s content.
The questions we ask
about optimizing article consumption, then, are
about how deeply we can get visitors to read the con-
tent they land on and about their navigation — how
we can improve the odds they’ll go on to read a sec-
ond page.
With video consumption, though, the situation is en-
tirely different: excepting sites that automatically
start videos when a visitor lands on the
page (we’ll discuss them later), there’s
massive attrition between the act of
visiting a page with video on it and the
act of actually pressing play. Of course,
if someone doesn’t even play a video,
the quality of the content is moot — we
can’t possibly hope to win them over
with a video that isn’t watched — so our
first goal must be to identify and un-
derstand who the best candidates are
for pressing play.
Does video content have a defined audience? We
might suspect that video is simply a means to an
end for content delivery — some stories have videos
attached, some don’t, and viewers will consume con-
tent as it’s laid in front of them. Or, conversely, we
might guess that video consumption is split at the
consumer level, that some visitors will watch videos
and others simply won’t. The answer, it turns out, is
more the latter than the former.
Above is a graph showing the breakdown audience
size by video consumption. The first thing that
stands out is the steep drop off on the left side of
the graph. The majority of people who
land on pages with video don’t press
play: only 35 percent of visitors who
land on pages with video will press
play anytime in a week. And, even
amongst those who do press play, the
volume of video each person plays
is typically quite low: nearly 90 per-
cent of those who do play videos only
watch one or two videos per week.
That implies that, for the most part,
when we’re talking about video consumption we’re
talking about flyby consumers who might happen to
press play, but aren’t on our sites for the purpose of
watching videos. For these visitors, context seems to
be key — the video plays that do happen are on articles
with high-quality, relevant videos.
There’s a twist, though: a tiny minority of visitors,
almost exclusively on desktops, watch a massive
portion of total videos consumed. In aggregate, the
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 65
top 0.5 percent of desktop video watchers — those
consuming 20 or more videos per week — account
for 17 percent of all video consumption across all
devices. That rate is fairly remarkable when com-
pared to consumers of written content, where the
top 0.5 percent of readers only account for a few per-
cent of consumption. And, not only do these people
consume a huge amount of content, they seem to
consume the vast majority of the vid-
eo content put in front of them: desk-
top visitors who watch over 20 videos
per week hit play on over 80 percent
of the videos that they see. With that
high a rate of consumption, the chal-
lenge for serving this segment of the
audience is simply feeding their ap-
petite for content.
Perhaps unexpectedly, all of the above only applies
to consumers visiting sites on desktops: we don’t
see such outsized consumption by a minority on
phones or tablets.
Variations in video consumption by device are com-
pounded by device usage patterns throughout the
day. Broadly speaking: desktops are used during the
workday, tablets have strong peaks during at-home
hours in the morning and evening, and phone usage
is roughly constant throughout the day (with a brief
dip during late-night hours).
That’s raw traffic, but video starts add their own
dimension. On desktops, visitors are, apparently,
dramatically more likely to play videos they come
across during working hours (not that you would
watch videos while sitting at your desk, of course):
23 percent of desktop visits to video pages result in
a video start on the weekend, while weekday desk-
top traffic has above a 33 percent start rate. If we
break down weekday traffic further and ask about
the hour of day, we see more evidence of the work/
home split: the desktop video start rate is over 37
percent at noon, falling to below 30 percent after 6
p.m. on weekdays.
On mobile phones, on the other hand,
the exact opposite is true: play rate
is just 17 percent on weekdays, but
it climbs to 23 percent on weekends.
During both weekdays and week-
ends, time of day has a much smaller
effect than what we saw on desktop.
Finally, tablets exhibit yet another in-
teraction pattern, with very low start
rates at any time of week, and essentially no differ-
ence between the weekday start rate (15 percent) and
that of the weekend (16 percent).
Given all of the above, the best bang-for-buck should
come from pushing a high volume videos to desktop
sites during weekdays and, if possible, another set
of videos to mobile visitors on weekends. With such
weak numbers, tablet video experiences are likely
the least useful to concentrate efforts on.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that the above is data
aggregated from dozens of sites (that opt-in to allow
us to anonymously aggregate data), and consump-
tion on sites you work with might vary radically
from what I’ve described here. The key takeaway,
though, is that video consumption is not simply
spread out evenly across our audience, with a ran-
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…A VERY SPECIFIC SET OF PEOPLE, ON A SPECIFIC SET OF DEVICES AND AT
A SPECIFIC SET OF TIMES, FORM OUR CORE AUDIENCE.
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 66
dom set of people watching videos. Rather, a very
specific set of people, on a specific set of devices
and at a specific set of times, form our core audi-
ence — our goal should be to identify those people
and figure out how to foster and grow that segment
of our audience.
Before I finish: what about autoplaying videos,
which I brushed aside above? Autoplay represents
a distinct challenge to analytics because it’s so
difficult to gauge user interest in the videos that
are playing. There’s some evidence that autoplay
videos may hurt video viewability (see this article
for one discussion of video viewability), and we’ve
seen that videos that automatically play slightly
increase the fraction of visitors who quickly aban-
don pages. On the other hand, of course autoplay
radically increases video playrates. Whether the
tradeoffs work in your favor is something that
needs to be decided on a site-by-site basis.
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JOSH SCHWARTZ is Chief Data Scientist at Chartbeat. He focuses on applications of machine learning and optimization to
help media companies grow and monetize their audience. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington
Post and The Atlantic, among others. In a prior life, he researched machine learning, optimization and computer vision at MIT,
Cornell and the University of Chicago. In another prior life, he was a moderately successful coffee entrepreneur and a slightly
less successful bicycle racer. He occasionally tweets as @joshuadschwartz.
J U A N - C A R L O S M O L L E D A Chair, Department of Public Relations
University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications • @GlobalPRMolleda
STA K E H O L D E R S A R E I N C H A R G E ,
S O O R G A N I Z AT I O N S CO U N T O N
DATA A N A LY T I C S A N D I N S I G H TS
Public relations and communica-
tion management professionals are
juggling with the reality that their
stakeholders are taking charge of
cyberspace’s conversations and
creating their own communities.
They are influencing each other.
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 67
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 68
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MANAGING THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS SOLELY
BASED ON INTUITION AND EXPERIENCE IS CONSIDERED SUSPI-
CIOUS TODAY.
A t the same time, they seem
to choose when and how to
engage with brands, causes,
and movements. (Millennials,
fortunately, appear to have a
more cordial cyber-cohabita-
tion with brands).
Organizations, in turn, are losing control over digital
communication exchanges and are being forced to
engage with stakeholders on their own terms and
spaces. Empowered stakeholders are setting their
own issue agendas.
Organizations’ control over interac-
tions and exchanges, however, could
reach a balance through the effec-
tive use of data analytics that are
translated into insights to inform
decisions and actions. This requires
constant assessment of stakeholders
and consumers and a relevant and authentic voice
that would likely be heard. It also requires that or-
ganizations become active actors in fluid conversa-
tions and communities. At the same time, organiza-
tions must be true to themselves.
Data without insights are irrelevant. Significantly,
translating data into insights is becoming a critical
challenge for public relations and communication
professionals. This is also true for marketers. Forbes
Insights explained, “The holy grail is to be able to
understand how to act on this data, how to make
the metrics predictive for future business growth.”
Business and organizational growth and legitima-
cy depends on effective stakeholder and consumer
engagement and acceptance. Growth, like success,
should be precisely targeted through performance
indicators and metrics.
Managing the decision-making process solely based
on intuition and experience is considered suspicious
today. Therefore, training professionals is needed
because data amplification is here to stay and data
application is something they must master. As Cap-
gemini CEO Paul Thorley explained: “With more
data important to an organization’s activities being
generated – and not necessarily in structured form
– outside an organization, these organizations have
started to take an interest in big data.” This phe-
nomenon gets more complex when
client organizations are demanding
not only “likes,” “fans” with insightful
comments, and “retweets”, but also
measurable results as evidence of
the effectiveness of their communi-
cation investment.
Public relations and communication
professionals should move from counting “likes,”
“retweets,” and conducting glorified content analy-
ses of comments, conversations, blogs, and media
coverage, to assess strategic outcomes and results.
The meaning of success would have to constantly
be redefined as communities of stakeholders and
consumers form and change.
University of Oklahoma Associate Professor Mi-
chael L. Kent and University of North Carolina
Assistant Professor Adam Saffer, in a 2014 study,
stated that “The relevance of public relations is
threatened, as communication professionals be-
come minions of new technology, rather than
masters. They concluded, “[s]ocial media research
needs to move beyond simply counting tweets, and
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 69
examining blog posts and move into prediction un-
derstanding what our communication tools can tell
us about strategy decision making.”
Social media and web analytics join organizational
data and primary research to pro-
vide a holistic picture of stakehold-
ers’ concerns, expectations, priori-
ties, and drivers that activate them.
This requires an understanding of
data analytics and, most impor-
tantly, the identification of insights
that inform decision making and
actions. Moreover, the decisions
and actions should be aligned to
stakeholders’ expectations and ac-
ceptance levels.
Ongoing training is essential to deal with big data,
analytics, insights, and informed actions. Matt
Shaw, director of communications at the Council of
Public Relations Firms, in summarizing the views
of agency professionals, said that the industry re-
quires employees who “must know the client’s busi-
ness, be able to mentally visualize the meaning of
sets of data, be able to manipulate data, and be able
to tell the story of the data.” Creative and consistent
storytelling across all platforms would allow orga-
nizations to be “social” and embrace stakeholders in
their own turfs.
The communication industry
needs a roadmap for effective use
of data and analytics in commu-
nication; that is, an overview that
summarizes trends in public re-
lations use of data analytics and
how it is likely to evolve. Data
analytics is a subset of business
intelligence, and public relations
and communication profession-
als must use that data to make
business and communication decisions. How do
they draw insights from data? How do they trans-
form data into decisions and actions? How do they
predict stakeholders’ reactions? Finally, how they
learn to be a relevant and distinctive community
member should be on top of the priority list.
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CREATIVE AND CONSISTENT
STORYTELLING ACROSS ALL PLATFORMS WOULD ALLOW
ORGANIZATIONS TO BE “SOCIAL” AND EMBRACE
STAKEHOLDERS IN THEIR OWN TURFS.
JUAN-CARLOS MOLLEDA is a professor and chair of the Department of Public Relations and director of the online
master’s “Global Strategic Communication” in the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Flor-
ida (UF). He is also an affiliate faculty of the UF Center for Latin American Studies and a Fulbright Senior Specialist. He
currently acts as member of the board of trustees of the Institute for Public Relations and a founding member of its
Commission on Global Public Relations Research. Also, he acts as Latin American liaison of the Public Relations Society
of America’s Certification in Education for Public Relations (CEPR).
M I L L E N N I A L S A N D E N G A G E M E N T
J E F F F R O M M President, FutureCast • @JeffFromm
O N M I L L E N N I A L S : AG I L E CO N T E N T M A R K ET I N G
W I L L R E P L AC E S O C I A L M E D I A M A R K ET I N G
Marketers are often pegged with questions
related to the future of social media such
as: Is Facebook still relevant? What’s the next
social platform? Which is more powerful: a like,
share, re-tweet, favorite? While these are all
fair questions, attempting to grade the social
landscape in this manner is counterproductive
and missing the greater point.
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 71
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 72
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THINK OF CONTENT AS AN
OPPORTUNITY FOR YOUR BRAND
VOICE TO LIVE EVERYWHERE YOU ARE NOT.
I N A MILLENNIAL-INSPIRED PARTICIPATION
ECONOMY, SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING IS DEAD.
Now, I didn’t say social media is dead– just the
idea that social media as the primary marketing
strategy is no longer an effective way to connect
with and engage Millennial consumers.
While it is true that Millennials are the heaviest us-
ers of social media and are 2.5 times more likely to be
early adopters of new digital, social and mobile tools,
they are using social media in a differ-
ent way than their Boomer and Gen
X predecessors. However, what drives
brand engagement for Millennials is
not just having a presence in the digi-
tal environment, but rather the content
that informs, inspires and engages
them through different channels. Your
approach to content is what will make
or break your marketing communica-
tion efforts in the future. Social Media is simply one
way to activate your content strategy.
RE-IMAGINE CREATIVE EXCELLENCE WITHIN A
CONTENT EXCELLENCE™ FRAMEWORK
For the past 40 plus years, the great brands of yes-
terday were focused on creative excellence. They
“heated, beated and treated” their communications
to craft the perfect message then pushed those
messages out via various shotgun methodologies,
hoping to build brand awareness and regard for their
cherished product. This method was developed spe-
cifically for the boomer generation.
Boomers, unlike their Millennial children, are more
inclined to react positively to traditional advertis-
ing – newspaper ads, TV and radio spots and the
like. While these methods may still build awareness
within the millennial demographic, they are rarely
interactive or engaging enough to inspire true Mil-
lennial brand love. Ultimately, awareness alone will
not correlate in any way to extra-ordinary and sus-
tainable financial performance.
What may accomplish those goals, however, is a
strong content driven campaign. The phrase “con-
tent marketing” has recently been making headlines
but very few marketers really under-
stand the true definition of content
and how to utilize it in order to engage
the Millennial audience. Content is es-
sentially the communication consum-
ers choose to spend time with.
Think of content as an opportunity for
your brand voice to live everywhere
you are not. We used to think of adver-
tising as a means of communicating a message to a
target audience. In this way, traditional advertising
messages were limited to their specific medium. Mil-
lennials, however, are the first generation to be con-
sidered digital natives and they have transformed
the market so that consumers experience brands in
a fluid way. Advertising is no longer limited to just
one medium. If I am a Millennial, I may be doing
work on my computer, while checking Facebook on
my phone, all while I am listening to my premium
Spotify account. This means that as a brand, there
are constantly multiple channels to reach a consum-
er at any given moment. Content is about the mes-
sage, the context, the opportunity to share it and my
sense of how your brand helps me connect to some-
thing more than your product (does your content in-
spire a sense of purpose?).
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 73
Your content strategy should be about activating and
engaging your digital community in ways that tradi-
tional advertising never could.
WE LIVE IN A WORLD OF AGILE CONTENT
AND IT FUELS ENGAGEMENT
The brands that consistently create the most agile
content will experience the most
positive millennial responses. Agile
content brings the real-time com-
munication piece into the content
marketing game. This type of con-
tent allows brands to be nimble and
up-to-date with current trends and
conversations. Brands that incorpo-
rate agile content into their market-
ing plans are constantly checking
and reevaluating their progress and
success.
In order to better understand how
agile content works, let’s explore this concept through
the lens of a standup comedian.
First, the comedian writes their jokes. S/he typically
knows what gets laughs and what doesn’t, but with
new material he never knows for sure so he books
smaller venues in order to test his new sketch.
During the first performance, his main joke does not
get the response he thought it would. Immediately,
the comedian altered the joke and the second time he
told it the crowd could not stop laughing. His agility
and ability to reevaluate his performance based on
audience reaction ultimately lead to a successful per-
formance.
Like the comedian, brands must be able to think rap-
idly and constantly revise the content they push out.
The key is to utilize data in order to create actionable
content strategies.
Traditionally, brands analyzed what consumers did in
the past to predict the future. Now, agile data combines
consumer, product and social data that
allows brands to study Millennial ac-
tions and behaviors in real time in order
to gain insights that can be utilized to
create content that is even more engag-
ing than it was two hours ago.
FOCUS ON CREATING CONTENT THAT IS
“SHAREWORTHY” AND MEANINGFUL
Millennials have a major peer affirma-
tion theme and they share what inter-
ests and inspires them not simply what
big companies want them to share.
Think about how agile content is con-
stantly being recreated based on consumer responses.
The goal is to ultimately create content that Millennials
want to share.
The idea of content being “shareworthy” is nothing
new. Marketers used to encourage sharing by word-
of-mouth. This trend is strong with Boomers and Gen
Xers but is taken to a whole new level when we bring
in the digital native millennial generation. As a re-
sult, today we talk about “word of mouse” rather than
word of mouth. The “share” is no anomaly; we’ve just
shifted environments where people are sharing. Re-
member, I said social media marketing is dead not
social media. Millennials especially are sharing their
opinions on their personal pages and have no qualms
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THE GREAT BRANDS OF TOMORROW WILL
CREATE DIRECT AND MEANINGFUL CONTENT BECAUSE
IF THE CONTENT CREATED DOES NOT
HAVE A PLACE IN THE MILLENNIAL’S LIFE,
THEY WILL SKIP OVER IT AND MOVE ONTO
CONTENT THAT DOES.
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 74
about being brutally honest when it comes to their
brand preferences.
Millennials are also more likely than other genera-
tions to share branded content if they relate to it or it
somehow affects their life.
Remember the Seinfeld “Break Up” Episode? George
says, “It’s not you; it’s me.” The “It’s not you; it’s me”
principle is key. Sharing is rooted in peer affirma-
tion. When a Millennial interacts with a brand’s con-
tent, they think about how they personally feel about
themselves when they share that content with their
friends, family and random strangers (remember this
is the “selfie” generation.)
The great brands of tomorrow will create direct and
meaningful content because if the content created
does not have a place in the Millennial’s life, they will
skip over it and move onto content that does.
The most shareworthy and meaningful brands will
absolutely have the highest probability of sustained
economic performance because those will be the
brands people choose to interact with.
IF YOU DO IT RIGHT, THEY’LL DO IT FOR YOU
In the future, the most successful brands will lever-
age the relationships they have with consumers so
that the consumer is essentially doing the marketing
for the brand – at their own time and expense. Think
about the User Generated Content that has popped up
all over the Internet. Starbucks does not ask Millenni-
als to take pictures of their Pumpkin Spice Lattes (yes,
it’s that time of year again) but they are doing it any-
ways. Those pictures are shared, liked, retweeted and
regrammed – not by Starbucks but by the Millennial’s
friends. In a matter of 140 characters, that millennial
has just become your top branded content curator.
Millennials are leading the pack when it comes to
content engagement but with them are Boomers and
Gen Xers. Although Millennials are the primary in-
fluencer when it comes to digital campaigns, other
consumers are taking on a Millennial Mindset™. This
means that although they are not technically a part
of the millennial generation, they are consuming
brand messages in the same way as Millennials. Ulti-
mately, as Millennials come to expect content driven
campaigns more and more, the rest of the population
will soon follow suit.
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JEFF FROMM is president of FutureCast, a Millennial marketing consultancy, contributing writer for Forbes, PSFK & Amer-
ican City Business Journals. He frequently speaks about millennial consumer and marketing trends to leading profession-
al organizations as well as public and private company events. Jeff is the co-author of “Marketing to Millennials; Reach
The Largest & Most Influential Generation of Consumers Ever” (2013) and his new book “Marketing to Millennials as New
Parents” is forthcoming (Q2 2015). Jeff has 25+ years of hands-on experience with brands, including SONIC, Hallmark,
Build-A-Bear Workshop, KC Masterpiece, Sprint, Whole Foods, Warsteiner Beer and Payless. Leah Swartz, a Millennial &
writer, also contributed to this post.
D A V I D A R A B O V CEO & Co-Founder, Elite Daily • @EliteDaily
As Elite Daily continues on its current trajectory of growth, we find ourselves in a unique position within the digital media industry. With our predecessors leading the way in redefining digital content, virility and brand engagement, we have noticed that most — if not the majority — of their engagement is mea-sured in one dimension: social media.
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 75
O N M I L L E N N I A L S : CO M M U N I C AT I O N
A N D E N G AG E M E N T A R E S M A L L E R
PA RTS O F A L A R G E R EQ UAT I O N
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 76
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AUTHENTICITY IS AN ESSENTIAL
PART OF CONTENT BECAUSE IT IS THE
MAIN DRIVER OF ENGAGEMENT.
C ommunication and engagement
strategies are ever-evolving,
especially in digital media, in which
trending topics shift in a matter of
minutes. Digital media platforms,
including Elite Daily, are currently
utilizing an outdated model of
measuring engagement, which focuses on conversa-
tion rates, amplification and cost per thousand (CPMs).
We have recognized that these vehicles of engagement
and communication are heavily tilted to
favor the advertiser.
For the purposes of this explication, let’s
define engagement in its current form.
Engagement, in essence, is an emotive
reaction to a form of communication,
whether positive or negative. In other
words, when we publish a piece of con-
tent, we will consequently elicit a reac-
tion from our audience. This reaction comes in the digi-
tal form of a comment, a tweet and/or a Facebook share.
Being the Voice of Gen-Y, with a community of 2,500+
contributors and 54 Million unique visitors[1], we carry a
major obligation that is immeasurable by any metric or
analytic to our community of readers. Our number one
priority is communication and engagement with our au-
dience, which, similar to our content, is always evolving.
As the media of content delivery continue to evolve, we
have undertaken the responsibility to pioneer innova-
tive ways in which our community and audience might
engage with our content. We are creating new methods
to fulfill the needs of our clients, while simultaneously
keeping our company’s commitment to put the reader
first.
Through our commitment of delivering content that
Millennials resonate and engage with, we have identi-
fied four “ingredients” we would recommend for media
companies to adopt when trying to capture the time and
attention of Millennials.
1. Be Authentic
Millennials have an uncanny ability to decipher when
content is genuine or when it’s selling them some-
thing beyond the thesis statement of a piece. Media
companies need to understand that the
Millennial demographic thrives in trans-
parency, whether it is with friends and
family or with the content they resonate
with. Authenticity is an essential part of
content because it is the main driver of
engagement. If a specific topic resonates
with the reader, he or she, in turn, is more
likely to engage with the content and
share it with his or her network.
2. Tell a Story, Don’t Spit Out Information
It is easy to convey facts and opinions in content; the
ability to tell a story about said facts and opinions is a
completely different ball game. For example, raw data
concerning the student loan debt are quite simple to
state: 40 million Americans are responsible for 1.2 tril-
lion dollars worth of student loan debt. If we take that
information and weave in a personal narrative about
how a Millennial utilized and leveraged his knowledge
of congressional bills so that he was able to refinance
his loans and pay them off in 24 months, we have
found a story worth engaging with. Why? It’s simple:
It resonates with people. Readers like to engage with
content that resonates with their personal stories and
reinforces the notion that they are not the only ones
going through specific stages in their lives.
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications
3. Cater to the Individual
The Millennial generation is composed of millions of
people who love their individual fashions, opinions
and lifestyles. Never has another generation driven in-
dividualism the way Millennials do. It is important to
make sure that the content media companies are pro-
ducing caters to the individual as much as the masses.
Yes, this is a difficult task, but not an impossible one.
In order for readers to engage with
content, they must first relate to it.
Being vague and providing a “one
size fits all” content strategy is an
ineffective delivery approach if you
are looking to engage with Millen-
nials. Create content that resonates
with the individual, and the masses
will follow.
4. Create Value
As digital media pioneers into new
and unexplored frontiers, the indus-
try has to continue to create value for its audience. When
producing content, media companies should be asking
themselves:
• “How will this create value for the reader?”
• “Will the reader be more informed because of this
content?”
• “What value are we providing to our reader beyond
x and y?”
• “Will the reader be inclined to share this?”
• “Would I, personally, share this?”
• “Does this create value for our brand as a whole?”
As we pioneer digital media and content
engagement, it is important to keep op-
timizing engagement. Communication
has been a necessary part of the human
condition since the dawn of time, and
though its forms and tools have clearly
evolved, the underlying notion has re-
mained the same.
We are not in a position to dictate how other companies
should be thinking about their communication/engage-
ment strategies; it is simply not our prerogative. Rather,
we can provide some guidance in engaging Millennials
through what has worked for Elite Daily.
In one sentence, I can sum up the strategy for the fu-
ture of content communication/engagement: Put the
reader first.[1] August 2014 Google Analytics Report
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IN ONE SENTENCE, I CAN SUM UP
THE STRATEGY FOR THE FUTURE
OF CONTENT COMMUNICATION/
ENGAGEMENT: PUT THE
READER FIRST.
DAVID ARABOV is CEO and Managing Editor of Elite Daily. While studying at Pace University, David started Elite Daily as an online
publication that “Millennials can’t get enough of,” as Business Insider described it. Elite Daily has quickly become one of the most
popular sites on the web, due to David’s understanding of the void in the marketplace for content specific to this generation,
written by this generation. The site reaches over 40 million people a month and employs over 35 Millennials.
© University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications 77
